


The Multiverse Has Ley Lines (And They All Point to You)

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drabble Collection, M/M, specific tags in chapter summaries, various side pairings - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 04:59:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 21,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18844120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Drabbles about, on, and around Sirius and Remus—whether they're meeting for the first time or falling in love for the thousandth day in a row, I'm putting all these little AUs in one spot :>**This is a living work! Please read chapter summaries for tags/descriptions specific to each drabble**





	1. Table of Contents

1) **Table of Contents**

 

2) Canyon Road — T, meet-cute, modern non-Magical AU.

3) Floral Suit, Florid Heart — T, meet-cute, modern non-Magical AU.

4) Deathtrap Blues (You Look Good in Leather) — T/M (suggestive themes), new relationship, modern university AU.

5) [Redacted] — T/M (suggestive themes), meet-ugly, cyberpunk AU.

6) AFK, or All Fucking Killed — T, established relationship, MMO/roomates AU.

7) Pralines and Ice Water — T, meet-horny, modern non-Magical AU.

8) I Traced the Stars and Came Home Shining (pt 1) — T, reluctant attraction, sci-fi/space AU.

9) I Traced the Stars and Came Home Shining (pt 2) — T/M (suggestive themes), reluctant attraction, sci-fi/space AU.

10) Sugarbones — M, discovering each other, modern non-Magical AU.

11) Growing Pains — T, post-Azkaban, canon compliant.

12) Loud and Avowed — T, Hogwarts era, canon compliant.

13) Sangre, Sudor, y Lluvia — T, meet-cute, American West AU.

14) Boneblack — T/M (suggestive themes), meet-ugly-and-also-horny, fantasy AU.

15) High Maintenance — T, meet-cute, modern non-Magical AU.

16) Powder Hound — T, meet-ugly, modern non-Magical AU.

17) Tempest's Tea — T, coming out to a parent, canon-compliant First War era.

18) Forbidden Fruit — T, meet-unconventional, modern non-Magical AU.


	2. Canyon Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-cute  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> Trust fund baby!Sirius, art gallery clerk!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> Awkward hello's, pre-Christmas, gentle yet sudden pining.

It’s been snowing for an hour, and the buildup is already getting deep.

Sirius is just as deeply irritated.

He’d had a nice place at the café but had promptly left in a fog, left to amble down Canyon Road with a jacket just barely too light for the weather and no scarf—shit, where did he put his scarf?!

He quits patting himself down in the middle of the thin little sidewalk and groans as he remembers, bunting his head against the adobe wall to his right. He left it at his table; the table five blocks away, the table he desperately doesn’t want to return to, the table right across from the seat Caradoc Dearborn had taken. The table at which Sirius had sat as ice crawled through his veins and the bastard who cheated and ran out on him (honestly, Sirius could have coped with the cheating but the cowardice was downright offensive) smirked.

Fucking  _smirked._

Smirking was  _Sirius’ thing._

The frown on Sirius’ face deepens as he shoves his hands into his pocket and nudges his chin down into his collar as far as it will go, not very far at all because he has this coat with him for fashion above all else:  _Por la moda, incluso si me folla._

Sirius Black is not supremely proud of his choices this month. It wasn’t supposed to snow at all this week, but then again the Land of Enchantment must have an in on Sirius’ unique bad luck.

The snow persists as Sirius trudges down the road and feels it soaking badly into his socks as he passes gallery after cozy little gallery. His shoes also weren’t made for the snow, very attractive and expensive but certainly not hardy. He curses a searing oath to himself under his breath and looks up at the inviting shape of a windowed door, old and Spanish with an “OPEN” sign strung across its front. He shoulders his way in without a second thought.

Warmth seeps into him immediately as the wood floor creaks underfoot, and Sirius closes his eyes to breathe a long sigh into the moment. Stillness, quiet, nothing but a gentle playlist of unobtrusive and nameless piano music filtering in from speakers mounted somewhere near the ceiling.

“Hi, welcome.”

Sirius opens his eyes at the voice from behind him, a bit scratchy but soft and low, faced with a violently modern piece made of reds and blues and golds on the wall before him before he turns around. The gallery attendant sits behind a tiny computer desk and a monitor screen, wearing two layered sweaters that should by all counts by hideous but somehow look well in the realm of this open and quiet space. A pair of blue-rimmed block glasses are perched on his nose and a wild whorl of brown curls sweeps artfully across his head, and he gives Sirius a little greeting smile that goes straight into the gaps of Sirius’ ribs.

Oh, goddammit. He’s gorgeous.

“Have you been walking for long?” The attendant stands up and Sirius bites his back teeth together, hands still jammed in his pockets and likely looking a completely mess with snow pocked into his hair and along his shoulders, when the man proves to be lithe and quite tall. He picks up a coffee mug on his desk and gestures with it. “I’ve just put on a fresh pot, if you’d like to warm up a bit?”

“Absolutely, yes, thank you.” Sirius’ voice comes out in a rush and he nods, shuffling a few half-melted flakes to the floor. The gallery attendant is wearing a pair of well-worn black jeans and a sturdy pair of boots, and Sirius is wondering immediately how in the fuck the universe has compressed his type down into one person so completely.

“Sure thing.” The man moves off to some other part of the gallery and throws a small smile over his shoulder as he goes, waving an open hand at the tiny winding path of the building around him. “Feel free to look around, and just holler if you have questions about anything. My name is Remus.”

Sirius swallows and fastidiously does  _not_ stare at Remus’ backside as he walks. “Thanks.” He pauses blankly for a monent before one of his synapses fires a bit late after Remus has already passed through a threshold into another room; “My name’s Sirius.”

Remus pops his head back around the corner with a bright grin. “Nice to meet you, Sirius. Do you take milk or sugar?”

Sirius shakes his head and finally seizes the motor function to begin stomping the snow from his boots on the doormat beneath him. “Just black, thank you.”

“Great. Hang tight, and I can show you around a bit once you’re warmed up.” Remus drums his fingers shortly on the doorjamb beside him, looking perhaps like he’s about to say something else, before he bites his lips together in an endearing show of hesitation and scurries away into wherever the kitchen is.

Sirius’ insides bloom, beginning to warm him thoroughly from the inside out.

Alright. Maybe he could do to scoff just a bit less at the concept of “enchantment.”


	3. Floral Suit, Florid Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-cute  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> Supermodel!Sirius, hairdresser!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> Quiet entitlement, New York City, haughty wiles overtaken by a hottie (wild!!)

Sirius tries not to touch his hair again. It’s falling in his face and it’s entirely too long and it will get oily if Sirius keeps pawing it back from his forehead, but this is his own fault.

He should have gotten it cut before a summer in Florence, the city where he comfortably speaks the language and voraciously adores the food and unashamedly goes through men like a revolving door without his agency breathing down his neck to  _Quit making a fool of yourself in the tabloids._ Italians don’t give a shit about yet another pretty American romping around with the other editorial models. They’ve got loads more interesting things to photograph, like…buildings. And art? Nature. Something like that. Far more interesting than Sirius’ growing and unruly hair, although he’s loathe to admit an old city wall might be more captivating than his face.

The car pulls up outside the trendy SoHo salon and Sirius flashes his driver a winsome smile through the rearview mirror. “Thanks, have a good one. Drive safe.” He narrowly avoids a drying puddle on the curb as he steps out, his Manolos impeccable as the day he bought them.

“Thanks, man, you too.”

It’s always distantly satisfying to Sirius when people don’t recognize him and treat him just a bit more genially like that. His campaign is plastered across Times Square, encrusted with lights,  _Be That Bold;_ smirking over New York in that smart floral suit had fought against the stylist not to wear at every fucking turn—although it had turned out pretty goddamn stunning, and he sent her flowers and that new Balenciaga tote in recompense once the shoot went to print. Sirius has had drivers ask for selfies, voice memo recordings, and autographs when they’ve recognized him, but the ones who only smile to themselves and treat him like a normal human do more for his general wellness than those who fawn.

Not get to get it twisted: fame is the fucking shit. But every now and then it feels nice just to exist.

Sirius flicks down his sunglasses and breezes into the hair salon, already eager to have it clipped back to shoulder-length and out of his way again. There’s a shoot tomorrow he knows will have it braided up and out of his face, but even just lounging at home has gotten annoying with strands ticking his upper back when he least expects it.

“Good morning!” Marlene at the front desk recognizes him immediately before Sirius removes his shades again, and he smiles genuinely at her. Marlene had been too starstruck to even talk to Sirius the first few times he came into the salon— _Pöttery,_ unnecessary umlaut and all—with a brilliant red blush so fierce it showed clearly beneath her dark skin. Sirius had complimented her hat and nose piercing in same sentence and almost cracked up when she swooned. She’s come a long way since then, only ever betraying her fluster when Sirius really dials up the charm on her Just Because.

“Morning, Marley—” Yup, there’s the blush. “I’m here for my 11:00 with Luna?”

Marlene scrolls quickly on the sleek computer mouse and types a few entries, polished black stiletto nails clicking on the keys. Sirius keeps in his barking laugh when he notices her new manicure blunted at the middle and index fingers of her right hand, and he’s so tickled by the detail that he doesn’t notice Marlene frown to herself until she makes a low hum of realization.

“Sorry, Mr. Black, but I don’t know if you heard while you were away; Luna moved to L.A.”

“What?!”

Sirius’  _I’m A Supermodel_  voice leaps in immediately without him meaning to. Luna Lovegood does—did, he supposes,  _Fuck!_ —the best hair on the east coast. Sirius stands staunchly by the fact that queer women do the best hair, and where the hell is supposed to find another lesbian who can cut and color jet-black hair as though she’s imbuing with motherfucking magic?!

He’s about to let all that fly with a very sharp sneer, but kudos to Marlene when she’s able to leap on the rest of her sentence before Sirius can launch his tirade—“But, she hand-picked her replacement stylist with specific attention to your needs, and Remus will be taking care of you today.”

Right on cue, Marlene looks over her shoulder and indicates someone approaching around the chic off-white wall lined with sponsor products. Sirius is still vaguely fuming, glaring just enough to not wrinkle his forehead but still dredge up all sorts of fury behind his stare. Although, when the person stops beside the reception desk, Sirius mostly forgets how to be angry. Nonetheless breathe.

He’s tall, not quite as tall as Sirius but still plenty long. He has a colorful sleeve tattoo disappearing up into an elbow-rolled shirtsleeve on one arm and a complex array of bracelets wound around the other wrist, and he smiles at Sirius with the sort of smile that says  _Oh, Hi, I Don’t Know Why We’re Looking At Me But Yes, I’m Here._  His cheeks dimple on sandy-gold skin, to the chagrin of Sirius’ knees that nearly give out. He has a sharp undercut, neat to fault that skirts pierced ears in a tight fade, before tumbling into a tamed mass of Clark Kent-y soft brown curls atop his head.  _Oh hell and shit,_  Sirius is so fucking weak for literally all of him.

“Hey! Are you my 11:00? I’m Remus.”

Sirius screams internally, shrieking and dousing himself with gasoline at the back of his mind, when the hairdresser’s voice comes out with the curves of an accent Sirius pinpoints immediately as Algerian.  _Shit, shit, shit, this is good, this is bad, this is so fucking good, this is SUCH A DISASTER._

“Hi. Yeah. Sirius.”

Sirius manages, fucking  _somehow,_ a creaky smile, and takes the proffered hand for a handshake. It’s warm, and Remus’ grip is strong. Remus gestures at his hair as though he has the same long style as Sirius, and it’s then that Sirius’ awareness chooses to point out that Remus’ top two buttons are undone just artfully enough to reveal the hint of a chest tattoo.

Scratch that; dousing himself with gasoline and kerosine.

“We’ll give you a trim, no? You have another photoshoot soon, I would assume.” Remus gives him a cheeky grin that summons his dimples again, and Sirius can only nod.

“Yeah, yes. It’s—I really need it cleaned up.” A stupid little laugh trips out of him, and those shiny brown eyes under Remus’ well-kept eyebrows laugh along with him.

“Sure thing. Come back with me, I’ll take care of you.”

Sirius doesn’t ignore the way those black jeans hug a pair of very strong-looking legs beneath a perfectly-done Fench tuck at the front of Remus’ shirt as he turns to guide Sirius back into the salon.  _Yes indeed,_  Sirius lets himself think, catastrophe unwinding perfectly in the safety of his brain,  _you most certainly will._


	4. Deathtrap Blues (You Look Good in Leather)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T/M** _(suggestive themes)_  
>  New relationship  
> Modern university AU
> 
> Mechanic!Sirius, student/TA!Remus  
> POV - Remus
> 
> Stumbly flirting, a motorbike, throwing every piece of caution to the wind and hoping it doesn't blow back.

“It’s just a five-minute ride.”

“I’m aware, but that’s also a fucking deathtrap.”

Sirius rolls his eyes so dramatically Remus is surprised his corneas don’t pop off and spit his eyeballs to the street at his feet.

He’s got to admit, Sirius looks fantastic in riding leathers. His jacket is perfectly battered with the sort of wear and tear that belies careful use without abuse, the pads on his chaps make Sirius’ thighs look even more delectable than usual—a feat in and of itself—and those motorcycle boots that look as though they could kick bones to dust do absolutely filthy things to Remus’ guts. Pair that with the messy braid shrugged across Sirius’ shoulder and the smug expectancy scrawled across that stupid, handsome face of his, and Remus is nearly putty in those riding-gloved hands of his.

_Nearly._

“I have a jacket and a helmet for you, come on. It’s five minutes.”

Remus purses his lips and adjusts the strap on his heavy backpack. He has mountains of TA grading to do tonight on top of a massive paper due for McGonagall by the end of the week, and he doesn’t fancy trying to get all of that done with two broken arms. “It takes half a second to get into a horrific accident. That means we’ll have six-hundred chances before you get me home,  _not_  including the likelihood of traffic.”

Applied Statistics is a lot more complicated than that, but Remus likes simplifying bits of his degree to make himself feel better about things that make him anxious. If it’s logical, it can’t be  _that_  ridiculous. Right?

He expects Sirius to roll his eyes again, but the stupid, stupid, gorgeous, stupid asshole only smiles softly and steps onto the curb and up a bit to meet Remus on the library entryway’s bottom step. He’s got his helmet resting against his hip under one arm and is very close; one hand apart, a couple breath’s distance, three blinks of an eyes and maybe two shakes of a lamb’s tail for good measure—Remus swallows. “And intersections are even more dangerous than roadways,” he murmurs, obstinate to a fault.

He never should have messaged Sirius. He should have followed his higher thought three weeks ago when it told him Sirius’ Grindr profile was absolutely a catfish—not that there was much  _thinking_  going on besides below his belt with a bowl of weed in his lungs, but that wasn’t the point—instead of following his gut and striking up a chat;  _You had parents keen on silly names too? Hi, Starboy, you can call me Moon Man._ Sirius had replied almost immediately. Remus had thought they would just hook up, but Sirius invited him to get coffee. And then a drink. And  _then_  hook up. Which, all of them were fantastic, but Sirius is a busy mechanic and Remus is a busier grad student, and he was dead-set on keeping it strictly sexual until Sirius had offered to pick him up from the library after several fraught messages from the depths of the stacks not twenty minutes ago.

R:  _help, i’m drowning_

S:  **In pussy?**

R:  _lol that would be a lot less work. no, the library_

S:  **A shame. Want me to come pick you up?**

R:  _i shouldn’t leave til i finish grading_

S:  **And I shouldn’t be gearing up to come get you already. Whoops, there are my keys. WHOOPS, I’m starting the ignition!**

R:  _lmao you don’t have to, honestly_

S:  **Brb Remus, really shouldn’t text while I’m driving. Be out front in 10?**

R:  _sure :)_

The smiley face had been total overkill, but something in Remus was exciting to fuck off without worrying about it for once.

But he was not about to get on a motorcycle. Of fucking course Sirius Black rides a motorcycle.

“I’m rescuing you from this library, one way or another.” Sirius speaks low in his voice, the way he had when he’d had Remus pressed against the walk the other night and begging for Sirius to fuck him harder, and Remus feels his face flush with the vivid memory.

“Not on a fucking motorcycle, you aren—”

Sirius cuts him off with a kiss, shocking with its ease and the comfort it shoots through Remus down to his toes, and Remus is shutting his eyes and kissing back for a moment before Sirius pulls back and smiles against Remus’ bereft little huff of breath at the loss of contact. “It’s a motor _bike.”_

“What the fuck ever.”

“Come on, Moony, I’ll keep you safe, yeah?”

Remus looks into those stormy grey eyes, even height with his own for once for the step of advantage he has where he’s standing, and is struck mute for a moment with the shocking depth of tenderness he sees in them. He lets his eyes flicker across all of Sirius’ safety measures and over his shoulder to where a second helmet is strapped to the passenger seat. It looks structurally sound enough. And…it really only is five minutes.

Fuck it.

“If you crash, you’re paying my goddamn tuition.” Remus flicks the tail of Sirius’ braid up to bop him on nose and disturb that infuriating charm written all over his face, and he pushes gently past Sirius and down to the bike as Sirius laughs with that wild, free laughter of his. Remus’ heart warms unexpectedly with it and he smiles secretively to himself, thrilled and centered all at once, as he picks up the helmet.


	5. [Redacted]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T/M** _(suggestive themes)_  
>  Meet-ugly  
> Cyberpunk AU
> 
> Mafioso!Sirius, hacker!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> A note, an encryption, the realization that the subsurface boils hotter than you thought.

_You can pick it up after 6:00, I’m home all night._

Sirius blinks at the address scratched neatly in blue ballpoint ink on the curling scrap of paper under the message that has no right being so…pouty. His face is getting hot and his back teeth are grinding even though his dentist said to quit doing that,  _Wear the night retainers, Sirius, you have them for a reason—_

“Fuck you,” Sirius says to the stillness of his sprawling penthouse, to nobody at all, maybe the distant thought of his dentist but more likely the foggy memory of the man behind the register yesterday at the dry cleaner’s. The suit jacket in his hands is clean, yes, perfect, fucking  _fine;_ but the ring box in the interior breast pocket is gone.

There isn’t a ring in the ring box. Sirius isn’t half so sentimental, and he’s got far too high an opinion of himself to bow to proposing to anyone besides his own clone. He doesn’t doubt that will be a possibility someday soon, not at least with the way BlackInk stock is soaring lately. Tracking software wasn’t where he had hoped to land, but it’s where he’s found himself. Swimming in everyone’s data—secrets, lies, photographs, audio bites—the blackmailing possibilities are endless and exceedigly lucrative. It charred his father’s heart so deeply it gave out on the old fuck. Sirius is stronger than that. Or, that’s what he tells himself.

Seething as he thumbs the scribbled address into his encrypted map application, Sirius snorts with derision when he sees the street view of the filthy area that comes up. He taps through it, looking up and down several blocks, before grinding his teeth together again and glancing at the clock in the top corner of his screen. Half-past 5:00. Fucking great.

There isn’t a ring in the ring box. Unless somebody would want to get engaged with a thumb drive full of documents exposing Lucius Malfoy’s drug production from the inside out.

An hour later, Sirius is hunched and scowling in the back seat of the most nondescript car he owns. He’s forced himself into a pair of battered jeans and a worn leather jacket so as to not get immediately mugged climbing the sure-to-be-shitty walkup stairs to this asshole’s apartment, and while the windows are tinted and his driver isn’t in a suit either Sirius still feels maddeningly exposed.

“I can come with you, you know.” Shacklebolt eyes Sirius from the front seat, and Sirius only glares at him. Kingsley is his favorite, but Kingsley also has an itchy trigger finger and has twice before shot an informant before Sirius has been able to drag the information out of them.

“Thanks, but no. Just keep your phone on you. I’ll call when I’m done.”

“Can’t call if you’re dead.” Kingsley’s carbon-black humor is appreciated, even though Sirius doesn’t laugh.

“I’ll be fine.”

They pull into an alley with several sad-looking trash bins scattered through it, and Sirius opens the car door. His only farewell is to slam it behind him, wishing silently he were in trousers that didn’t make him feel so fucking pedestrian, and turn away to walk the half-block before him to the address penned along the scrap he holds in his pocket like a worry stone.

The steps in the building creak as Sirius climbs them, and the evidence of rodents and other vermin making a home in this stairwell makes Sirius’ skin crawl. He reaches the fourth floor and ignores the blatant sounds of fucking from a few doors down as he knocks sharply—knuckles only.

The tenant swings the door open with an unceremonious lean, and Sirius remembers him immediately. He’s in a robe and joggers instead of the plain blue uniform from the dry cleaner’s, but the whirling curly hair and the unsettlingly-pretty mouth are exactly the same. His eyebrows go up and his own eyes flicker all across Sirius, clearly calling up his own memories, before he settles into a smug smile. Sirius glares.

“Evening,” the man croons. He props his elbow against the door jamb and looks at Sirius through his lashes. Sirius realizes he’s holding a steaming mug of tea when he raises it to his lips and sips from it noisily. Without preamble, Sirius holds up the written scrap of the address.

“Where is it.”

The tenant squints dramatically at the paper, slurping loudly from his mug again to attenuate Sirius’ fury even further, before making a small noise of intrigue. “Oh, it’s you,” he hums with a prim little smirk, as though he hadn’t recognized Sirius immediately. “I was wondering if you would drop by or just let me keep it.”

“Where. Is it.”

The other man’ eyes flash with challenge, golden brown and suddenly wolfish, and Sirius’ stomach drops when he realizes he’s made a staggering miscalculation somewhere along the way. This stranger isn’t just some middleman. He knows exactly who he’s dealing with.

In a motion that comes off as entirely accidental but smacks of purpose, the stranger lowers his left shoulder and eases the door open just barely far enough to reveal a high-tech rig completely at odds with the dilapidated building around him set up and churning away in the far corner of the cozy little studio hovel. “I haven’t the faintest.” His sigh is candy sweet, and Sirius wants to punch him. The man sips at his tea again, those lupine eyes dancing with challenging mirth, and Sirius also might want to see what he looks like beneath that robe.

But he knows better than to force his way into somebody’s apartment without casing it first. He’s more than a couple scars from that nonsense. “Your name.” He settles for switching up the demand, and the man across from him looks him up and down again, taking his sweet time. The athletic, banging romp down the hall reaches a tipping point and Sirius can’t help but glance over at it when an enthusiastic  _Yeah, yeah, oh fuck, yeah, yes, fuck me, daddy!_  breaks through the seam of the door and makes Sirius bite down even harder on his back teeth. The man in the doorway sniffs a laugh to himself.

“In this business, I tend to go by Remus.”

Fine, a codename is just as good for tracking. “Are you planning on leaking it, or what? Ransoming it?” Sirius careful never to say the data, the pictures, the files—his BlackInk commodities are only ever  _It._  Remus catches the meaning well enough and glances summarily over Sirius’ shoulders at the same time the sound of somebody climaxing with a loud, low groan shudders through the walls from the offending room.

“I don’t talk about business with my door open.” Remus fixes Sirius with another stare, and Sirius is struck by the years of knowledge that suddenly seem to live behind those pupils. He shouldn’t be doing this. He should go straight back down to Shacklebolt’s waiting car and order a hit on this very apartment tomorrow. But something in Remus’ stare promises answers to secrets Sirius doesn’t even know about yet.

Sirius steels his will and steps over the threshold, and the door catches softly behind him.

Remus sips his tea again, nodding mildly as though appraising the taste of a light herbal brew. “Good man, Sirius.”


	6. AFK, or All Fucking Killed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Established relationship  
> MMO/Roommates AU
> 
> Raids, chatter, an unexpected (or very, very expected) bit of inspiration.

**_BlakStar has entered the server._ **

**_MoonL4nding has entered the server._ **

 

**_OhDeer has entered the server._ **

 

 **_BlakStar:_ ** **yo**

 **_OhDeer:_ **heyooooo

 **_MoonL4nding:_ ** _sup jam_

lol jam

_my thumb slipped_

**JAM**

nonono don’t fucking start

 

**_TopTierRatata has entered the server._ **

 

 **_TopTierRatata:_ ** _hey ladies_

**LMAO JAMMMMM**

_did i miss something_

_padfoot is being padfoot_

i refuse to let my nickname turn into this abomination

**sorry jam what was that**

fuck you it’s going to be like this for the whole raid isn’t it

**YUP**

_okay the dungeon is S level and the respawn is super unforgiving after the last patch so we need to not die like assholes this time_

_wE???????_

sirius*** needs to not die like an asshole

**i embrace my faults but also that dragon was glitchy af**

LOL TWO-SHOTTING YOUR ASS DOESN’T MAKE IT GLITCHY

_fucking kek sirius do have anything on your kit this time besides debuffs_

**okay first of all fuck you**

**second of all i have a dagger this time around**

**so**

_oh yes the eldritch horror beneath the caverns will get rekt by your wooden dagger_

**ITS FUCKEN MITHRIL YOU DICK**

my question is

why the everloving fuck is our healer wearing STEEL ARMOR

**makes my guy look hot**

**don’t pretend you wouldn’t fuck this**

**/dance**

/dance

_/dance_

_FOCUS PLEASE_

_if we die we’re super fucked, I’m not kidding_

**/dance**

lol nice

 

_oooo trouble in paradise_

**LMAO he threatened to stop paying his half of rent if I don’t equip a mass heal**

_IEHGWHEGAJE YOU WENT IN LAST TIME WITHOUT A MASS HEAL I’M FUKCIGN_

yeah pete we fuckin uhhhhh Lost™️

**big time**

_ALRIGHT ANYWAYS_

_james I need you tanking_

_pete please bring all your lightning spells_

_i’m doubling up on poison_

 

_sirius accept my fucking trade_

**why**

_HEALING BUFF ROBES, YOU NEED THEM_

jfc

_i’m fucking wheezing_

**ew**

lol your dude looks like a grandpa

**i hate these**

 

**they can’t hear you in the chat when you’re shouting at me irl babe**

_EQUIP THEM OR I WILL PK YOU SO HARD_

lmfaoooooo

**oooo talk dirty to me**

_rofl i’m screenshotting this_

_why the fuck did we let him roll healer_

i think it was, and i quote, “fuck dps i want a wizard beard”

 

**i love you too**

 

**awwww so sweet**

_lmao what’s he saying???_

**LOL HE’S TRYING TO KICK ME FROM**

**THE GUILD**

lmfao moony no

no we need him

comic relief in the heat of battle

he’s so useless but so good for morale!!

**wow THANKS**

 

_Okay. Are we ready or not?_

 

_mate did you fucking kill him_

_nah_

 

oh shit he’s wearing the robes

oh SHIT I HAVE A COMBAT BUFF?

**yw**

_what a staggering change of heart_

**i have an incentive now**

_no_

**and it’s CALLED**

_NO SIRIUS_

**B L O W J O B   C E N T R A L**

omfg

_LMAOOOOOO_

_NOW????? DURING THE FUCKING RAID???_

**rofl no, later**

**after we Fucking Win**

**/dance**

/dance

_/dance_

_jesus christ_

_okay can we go now_

_are we ready_

I dunno moony, are we?

_fuck you_

_I am_

lol same

**YUP**

_-____-_

_alright_

_Let’s try not to fucking die, yeah?_

\o/

_bet_

**right-o, sugartits**

lmfao

_XD_

 

_/dance_


	7. Pralines and Ice Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-horny  
> Modern non-magical AU
> 
> Photographer!Sirius, model!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> A photoshoot, a pair of very small shorts, sinful purple lipstick.

Okay. Okay. Fucking  _okay._

He can do this. He’s a professional, he’s been all around the world on different photoshoots, he has a hawk’s eye for shape language, he’s a motherfucking god when it comes to lighting and mood and  _fucking shitting hell and high water he’s going to dissolve._

Sirius stares himself down in the mirror and points at his reflection, the edges of his face dotted with cold water from where he had splashed it. “You are a  _fucking photographer,”_ he hisses to himself, “no matter what the fucking subject matter is, okay? You get out there, you do your fucking job, and you don’t blow a fucking load in your trousers, alright?”

He takes another moment to glare, grim and defeated, at the desperate-looking man looking back at him. He really is pitiful.  _“Shit._ Alright.” Sirius splashes another palm of cold water over his face, dries off with one of the meager hand towels from the shitty aluminum dispenser, and stalks back into the studio.

Sirius Black, couture photographer renowned twice the world over, is losing his mind over a semi-nude photoshoot.

It isn’t like Sirius has never seen a beautiful person almost completely in the buff before. It’s his job to surround himself with staggeringly beautiful people, and he’s never had an issue on set before. But today?  _This_  shoot? For some reason, Sirius can’t calm his pulse or keep his camera from shaking when Remus Lupin sits before him.

The man is a god incarnate. He’s got hazel eyes that might very well short-circuit the guts of Sirius’ camera, a body made of polished sandstone that could have been sculpted by a master, a bone structure so shockingly handsome that just a look from him has rendered Sirius speechless, twice— _twice!_ —and an ass that Sirius has seen, oh yes, he’s seen it alright, exposed and proud and nearly fucking  _glowing_  through those laughably tiny black shorts that leave nothing to the imagination. When Sirius picks up his camera and assumes his position to start the shoot, he almost chokes on oxygen again.

Remus has a makeup artist and a stylist primping him at either side, but he’s perched on a velvet pouf with dramatic eyeliner elongating the corners of those staggering eyes and a dark berry-red lipstick painted along those pillowy, carven lips. The stylist is teasing his curls into an artful fall across his forehead while Remus holds his head up and back, pouting into the light as he listens halfway to something the makeup artist is saying as she touches up his blush, and Sirius doesn’t notice the long trailing diamond leash around his neck until Remus smiles sideways at him and Sirius looks away for the ferocity of the twisting in his lungs.

 _Shit._ Sirius has a thing for restraints. This is going to be the most glorious hell he could have ever imagined.

“Are we all set to go then?” The shoot producer, Lily, is clutching an over-stuffed clipboard and a huge tablet phone in either hand as she looks expectantly at Sirius over the top of her severely stylish spectacles. Sirius swallows thickly and nods.

“Yeah, cheers.”

Lily frowns at him, squinting at his hairline. “Are—you sweating? It’s like sixty-five degrees in here.”

 _All the better to make Remus’ nipples perk up._ Sirius shakes away the thought with a nervous laugh and shakes his head. “No, it’s, ah, water.”

“Water.” Lily repeats it back slowly, brows screwed together, and Sirius clenches his teeth and sets to tuning his camera aperture.

 _“Cold_  water.”

Lily picks up his lead with a lightly-dawning  _Ah,_ before she nods with quick efficiency and turns to the room, pin-straight red hair swinging along her back with the spin. “Alright, people, quiet on set, please! Let’s get started!”

Her assistant steadily turns up the music, and Sirius lets himself listen along to quell some nerves as the staff pick their way out of the first set with all it’s plush swells of furniture. The models always pick the playlists, their ideal grooves to stay in the proper zone as they work. Sirius likes hear where each model is coming from, and as he piles his hair up in a bun and takes up his camera to center himself before the set, he appreciates the low and slow pulse of synthwave bleeding through the studio hangar.

“Ready?” Sirius gives Remus as genuine a smile he can with the pulse so high under his skin, but apparently it works as Remus awards him the glory of a secretive little grin. One of the lighting rigs illuminates a flash of eager intrigue behind his eyes, and Sirius knows before he wants to admit it that he’s fucking smitten.

“Whenever you are, maestro.” Remus has a thicken southern drawl, somewhere deep down in the Carolinas if Sirius remembers his bio properly, and Sirius tries not to lick his lips with the errant thought of pralines and caramel. He lifts his camera, Remus sinks into his first pose, and Sirius drowns himself in the comfort of his work.

Snapping each photo is like taking one step closer to enlightenment, a paradise that tunnels out everything in the room besides Remus and the play of the light against his body; the angle of his profile against the backdrop; the way he tugs at the leash around his neck and pulls his poses into all sorts of tantalizing shapes—all with such ease and talent that it isn’t until a little while later that Sirius is nearly standing on the set and Remus is but a step away from the lens when Sirius realizes what he’s doing. Remus has his chin canted up, a hedonistic smirk on that purple-dark mouth, the crystals of the leash bitten between his perfect teeth, and his eyes boring into the camera. Sirius has the hand not controlling his camera steadying his balance on Remus’ knee, bent before him, and the contact is absolutely searing.

Sirius meets Remus’ eyes full-on for the first time not through his viewfinder, and Sirius feels his heart pull sharply. It isn’t enough that Remus is sex on legs, now he has to be riveting down to the depth of his pupils? It isn’t fair. None of this is fair. How can one person bottle the sun and keep it tamed inside of them like this?

“Alright, good work! Break for changeover!”

Sirius blinks rapidly when Lily calls out and the work light come back on, voices rising up to hum to a dull roar, and set assistants bustle in to begin resetting the furniture and backdrop for the next series of shots. He stands, addled, before a glowing touch to his wrist stills him with a sharp torque in his guts.

“You’re a fantastic photographer.” Remus is absently rubbing a trace of lipstick away from its place on the lesh with his free hand, and he’s shrugging off a little scrap of faux fur Sirius hadn’t noticed was wrapped around one of Remus’ deltoids. He takes his time taking his hand back from Sirius’ wrist, his fingertips soft and warm. “How have we not worked together before?”

Sirius laughs a bit, self-conscious at the sound but relaxing a bit when he notices Remus still smiling at him comfortably. “Thanks. Our paths just never crossed before now, I guess?”

The makeup artist comes back over to reapply some of Remus’ lipstick, and so Sirius assumes he’ll quit talking now. He sets to adjusting his camera settings for the darker backdrop going up, but Remus surprises him by speaking around the flutter of the makeup brush as though it wasn’t there at all; “Is there any way I can assure they’ll keep crossing after we wrap today?”

Sirius knows he’s blushing, a fierce pink rush from his collar to his crown, but he looks up anyways and nods automatically. “Absolutely.”

Which is silly, because there’s no way he can truly promise that beyond hoping a model’s hectic schedule can cross with his in hapless circles. But as the shoot rolls on and Sirius lets himself drown in Remus’ shapes and light for just a touch past safety each time, he feels a part of him reach out to the universe and nudge at its pieces to make sure his threads scoot just a bit closer to Remus’.

Okay.

_Okay._

Fucking okay.


	8. I Traced the Stars and Came Home Shining (pt 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Reluctant attraction  
> Sci-fi/Space AU
> 
> Admiral!Sirius, engineer!Remus  
> POV - Remus
> 
> Repairs, banter, one very shirtless captain.

_“Hell of a sight, isn’t it?”_

Remus doesn’t waste time sighing at the view sprawling out around them. He’d had plenty of time to do that in flight school, soaring into the stratosphere as the universe stretched into view with its billions of spangling stars and looming planets—but now there are repairs to do. Remus grunts the affirmative into his own comm set and tugs at a fussy bolt with the wrench tethered to his belt.

A piquant scoff pipes into Remus’ helmet, which makes him roll his eyes to himself.  _“The entire palette of creation itself is laid out before you, and all you can think to say is ‘hhr.’ Glad to know my new engineer is a barbarian.”_

Captain Sirius Black is particularly fond of waxing poetic against Remus’ own long-suffering pragmatism, and Remus had done his best to ignore it for the past week-and-a-half of their assignment together. But pardon him for getting a bit testy when something as important as the airlock safety catch needs a software update. “I’m not a barbarian, I would only rather not suffocate in a painful, attenuated death if the primary lock fails on this mechanism.”

 _“You can appreciate the universe and fix something at the same time, you know. Look, if my compass is calibrated properly then Canis Major should be twelve teraleagues in that direction.”_  Remus knows the captain is pointing somewhere into the distance, but he doesn’t deign to look over his shoulder. He’s had flings with two other men named Sirius—it had been the most popular baby name of 2160 and held the spot for some time after then—and Remus has run into no shortage of cocksure men nearing 30 years who wear the name like a badge of swaggering honor in the dim neon lowlights of nitropubs all across the galaxy.

It’s only slightly annoying that those men are precisely Remus’ type.

In all honesty, it’s cosmonauts in general: smug, smart, handsome, ripe for adventure and perhaps a bit of danger along the way. The perfect foils for Remus’ penchant for logic and comfort. Remus put up with them all when he was still banking on captaining someday before his far-view eyesight started shitting itself. Presently, he disconnects the breaker panel with a bit more force than necessary to peer at what’s inside. “Ah, it’s an easy fix.” Remus veers the conversation back to the task at hand with his habit of talking through his work, whether there’s somebody along to assist or just aloud to himself. “I only need to re-solder some of these channels, can you pass me the iron?”

Siris had insisted on suiting up and coming out into no-man’s land with Remus, this empty void beyond the comfortable interior of The Patronus where Sirius  _should_  be at his captain’s station and manning their voyage. But, according to Captain Black, autopilot exists for a reason and he likes to shadow his crew members on their tasks. And Remus is wont to argue with someone only a few missions away from his admiral stripes.

He also needs somebody to hold the toolkit while he works.

_“That’s this one with the dangerous-looking bits on it, right?”_

Remus glances at the proffered tool and can’t hold in a small smile when he sees Sirius offering him the wire sniffer. “No, actually the one just beside it that looks like a stylus.”

 _“Huh! Would have never guessed. Glad I’m not an engineer.”_ Sirius passes him the tool, the traversal suit gloves making his fingers bulky where Remus’ own engineering suit is thin for fine motor tinkering, and Remus is surprised to see the captain grinning at him when he does. He shouldn’t be surprised, Sirius’ default expression is smiling in all sorts of ways—arrogant smirks as he gives orders, leering grins when he flirts with the crew, battle-hungry snarls while he expertly navigates the careening ship through flaming asteroid fields; that last one had been more than a bit of a cocktail equal parts arousing and terrifying. But this smile surprises Remus for some reason.

“What?” He turns back to the breaker panel before he can let the captain see him blush, burying his feelings like a bad lead. Remus has always been prone to blushing like a Mars-ripe tomato. Sure, he can fuck pilot after pilot without any sort of tethers or consequence, but he‘s baffled by this foolhardy head-over-heels crush on his captain. They still have seven weeks left on this recon mission, and Remus is wont to spend them embarrassed after a miscalculated come-on. He alway bungles the uptake; Remus Lupin knows how to tune systems and tools like nobody’s business, but he’s awful at holding up a goddamn relationship.

_“Nothing. Only that you should smile more often, it looks well on you.”_

Remus snorts to cover his surprise, volleying back a mirror to Sirius’ earlier scoff, and is glad to be almost wrist-deep in the airlock guts for the virulence of the flush creeping up his neck at that. “If you’re spending enough time looking at me to decide what ‘looks well on me,’ I think I should be concerned for our crew’s general safety with you piloting.”

Sirius laughs, crackly and peaky through the comm but so painfully pretty in spite of the tech. Remus bites down on his lip and doubles his concentration.

The airlock safety is fixed within ten minutes—two minutes longer than Remus’ personal record for a task like that; his fingers shook more than once with Sirius so close, and Remus had found himself regretting bending to the captain’s request to hold the tools for him more than once before finishing. Back on the ship’s loading bay, Remus removes his helmet and goes immediately for a pouch of water as Sirius continues shucking his own suit.

“You know—” That’s how the captain starts at least half of his sentences,  _You know,_  as if proposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist yet; “I’ve rarely stopped to think about how many little pieces of maintenance it takes to keep a ship like this running.”

Remus sniffs a little laugh to himself as he drains the water pouch because of course Sirius doesn’t have a mind for such  _trivial_  things as making sure oxygen supply lines are airtight and core navigation systems are properly calibrated. “Shocking isn’t it?” He slips off his outer suit, down to the thermal underlayer, steps out of the material that pools at his feet. “It’s almost as if—we…”

He trails off in a stammer. Sirius is also stepping out of his traversal suit, but he’s foregone the thermal. Shirtless and just sweaty enough from the suit insulation to be enticing, the captain meets Remus gaping stare with a toothy smile. “What, been a while since you saw a naked human?”

“I— _no,_  you aren’t even naked—”

“I can change that if you want.”

Remus sputters while he shakes his head and accidentally strangles the empty plastic container in his fist, vaguely glad that he polished it off and doesn’t send water spurting everywhere. The garbled sound of his flustering arrests Sirius’ exaggerated movements to unbuckle his trousers, and when the captain laughs at his maddening joke it makes the fluorescent light shine dully off the bare swath of his diaphragm. Remus immediately murders the thought of dropping to his knees and licking Sirius there with a desperate, open mouth.

The release door hisses suddenly with a clean, metallic sound as Remus feels his face flush again, fighting uselessly with the twist in his guts to  _Stay down!_  like some sort of useless puppy. He hears the captain chuckle beside him, low and secretive, and the heat behind Remus’ cheeks increases. Remus taps the wake button on his spectacle implants and fastidiously ignores the feeling of Sirius taking his sweet time looking at Remus in a tight thermal, focusing instead on the lenses that swipe forward in front of his eyes and the notifications that had popped up on them while he had been fixing the mechanism.

“Afternoon, captain, I—oh.” First lieutenant Evans is waiting at the door with her eyebrows shooting nearly up behind her bangs and looking quickly between Sirius and Remus. Remus goes even redder, red as the twisty updo at the base of Evans’ neck, and she puts a hand to her mouth as though holding back a pursed grin. “Sorry to interrupt, but Pettigrew has information on the plant systems waiting for us on KS-67.”

“You’re not interrupting anything,” Remus tries to explain quickly, but Sirius beats him to the punch and pulls a wide, dramatic stretch through his body. Remus shuts his mouth and does  _not_  watch. But if he does, from the corner of his gaze, it is only cursory and in simple appreciation of a very fine specimen of a man, and— _Fuck,_  Sirius catches him looking. Remus turns away with a sharp flick of his eyes.

“We only just finished out there, no worries at all. Let me get back into uniform and I’ll meet Peter on the flight deck.” Sirius never sounds directly as though he’s giving orders, his voice easy and even-toned and insistent on always addressing crew members by their given names instead of titles, but it’s easy to tell when he means them. Evans salutes him with her hand to her brow and an enigmatic glance at Remus before she’s off, and Remus finds frustrated fury between his lungs like little flecks of platinum in exoplanet streams. He’s bundling his traversal suit into a pile to be dry cleaned when, feeling the captain’s eyes still fixed on him after he finally, unfortunately— _NO, stop that thought right there_ —pulls a shirt back on and sets to running hand through his dark, shining hair, Remus fixes the man with a look.

“What.” Deja vu hits Remus like doubled vision, and he glowers when Sirius catches it as well with a tiny smirk.

“I already told you, you should smile more. You have a dimple I like looking at.” The captain hangs his suit on one of the waiting hooks with casual elegance and tosses the toolbag to Remus without warning. Thankfully, Remus is quick to catch it; most of the pieces within cost just a bit more than a month of Remus’ salary on their own. “I think there’s a faulty circuit in my quarters, by the way. I’ll need you to come look at it later this evening.”

Remus manages to swallow and find his voice again, lined with as much petulance around its traitorous hints of desire, just before Sirius exits the main airlock door; “Are you really making a pass at me, or do you need an actual repair?”

Sirius waves a non-committal hand in the air and, infuriatingly, doesn’t give Remus the benefit of giving him one last look over his shoulder. “Both is good. Captain’s orders, corporal.”

The kernel of excitement that springs up in Remus’ throat at that keeps down another withering scoff. Seven more weeks suddenly seems like a  _very_  long time.

Well.

Could be worse.


	9. I Traced the Stars and Came Home Shining (pt 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T/M** _(suggestive themes)_  
>  Reluctant attraction  
> Sci-fi/Space AU
> 
> Admiral!Sirius, engineer!Remus  
> POV - Remus
> 
> A sojourn, a fuel tank, the patter of a heart monitor.

“Engineer to Patronus.”

The comms unit hisses blithe static into Remus’ ear, the same as the last forty minutes of his distress protocol, and he tries not to panic. He wets his dry lips again, taking a shallow breath before trying again; “Repeat, engineer to Patronus.”

A gust of dusty wind rips past, tugging sharply against Remus’ limbs even though he’s balled himself up as small as possible against the side of the jetty craft, and Remus shivers in the quickly-failing warmth of his traversal suit. “Repeat—” his voice cracks, and he tries hard to hold fast to his resolve, truly, he does, but the twinned stars in the distance that light this exoplanet are setting beyond the hilly horizon and Remus can almost feel the shadows beginning to elongate across the terrain. The wan pink glow of the emergency flare atop the jetty casts a small radius around him in a strange grey cast along the bluish tinge of the ground here, and that contrast has begun to deepen.  _“Repeat,_  engineer to Patronus.”

Something that almost sounds like the ghost of a connection flickers in Remus’ ear and he perks up, chest contracting with hope, as though sitting up straighter might fix the connection. “Repeat, engineer to Patronus, do you copy?”

Static.

Remus sags back against the jetty craft, sodium sand crystals digging against the back of his traversal suit and bites down hard on frustrated tears. He will  _not cry_  in deep space.

It had been a stupid idea to begin with. Pettigrew had a time-sensitive growth experiment running and needed another earth sample from N. Sigma 6–the one he had from the last recon was corrupted by iron salts, apparently lethal to whatever biocomponent he was trying to foster in that greenhouse of his. The Patronus was stretched thin already, with half the able crew on two other missions for diplomacy and carbon harvest, and so the relatively insignificant pickup mission had fallen to Remus.

 _It will be quick, out and back, won’t take longer than half a day. Evans says there’s even a spare jetty craft, nobody will be displaced._ Remus recalls Pettigrew’s nervous insistence, his doughy hands wringing unconsciously at the folds of his uniform lapels, eyeing the open circuitry before Remus with a self-conscious frown.

 _Except for me? There’s a lot more important things I could do with half a day._  Remus had almost bent back over the transistor grid in dismissal but he caught then the flicker of held-back derision in the corner of Pettigrew’s eyes; the barest wink of a sneer, that lofty grit of I Bet You Do sitting just behind his teeth. It hadn’t been the first time. Remus knows it isn’t a secret he’s fucking the captain, but the least the crew could do is be a bit more cavalier about it. Fury had sparked in his guts, and Remus had stood without meaning to with perhaps a bit too much force.  _But no, you’re right. I’ll collect your shit for you, Pete. Go prep the jetty then._

And now here he is, with the earth sample stored safely inside a craft with an empty fuel tank.

Remus has more sense than to let himself think Pettigrew had purposely wasted the combustion before Remus took off, but anger keeps him away from the more dire feelings of failure and sadness.

A tidy little chime from the traversal suit precludes the appearance of a triangular red warning beaming into the top left corner of Remus’ view visor. “[Warning: Suit power approaching 20%. Enter safety mode?]”

“Confirm.” Remus’ throat tightens around the command, and he clenches his back teeth together as the interior helmet lights dim and the ambient temperature along his limbs drops slightly.  _This is it, then._  Remus J. Lupin is going to die more than four teraleagues away from another human being. He had hoped, at least, to maybe be able to hold somebody’s hand through it if he’d had his way with fate. Idly, he knits his fingers together in a clasp that almost feels like prayer. If he thinks hard enough, the traversal suit layers around his hands make it feel distantly as though the touch is coming from someone besides himself. Closing his eyes, tipping his head back in minor resignation with a soft  _thok_  against the jetty craft’s hull, Remus allows himself the last-minute luxury of daydreaming.

Unsurprisingly, his thoughts morph gradually into the shapes of Sirius.

It‘s taken all but a short five days for Remus to fall head over heels for the roguish Captain Black after their first spot of time alone— _Careful, the breaker box might be flammable. You should take off your shirt to get a closer look at it,_  Sirius crooned in nothing but trousers and an underlayer himself as he had leaned back against the closed door to his quarters and dared Remus to comply. Comply he had, and then “complied” again twice more after making sure the breaker box had absolutely nothing wrong with it, enthusiastically bent over the captain’s desk. Remus had tried in earnest not to let the glow of his satisfaction burn too brightly after then, but it was impossible. As much as Remus is loathe to admit it, Sirius matches his namesake with the brilliant warmth and twinkling beauty at his center. Very little has shifted between them besides Remus finding himself smiling more than usual as the days pass on the Patronus, but unfortunately for him his prior default was a calm, collected frown. “Secretive” wasn’t exactly something one could call their relationship, however else it might be defined otherwise.

With his eyes shut, Remus can’t help but feel the buildup of desperate, frustrated tears behind his lashes. He had worked himself ragged at flight school only to fail. He had tried to land a position at the mainframe on land headquarters only to fail. He had agreed to help his bitter fucking crewmate on a fool’s errand only to  _fail._ Despite his familiarity with coming up short, Remus was still terribly unused to the feeling of loss. It isn’t fair. Despite its vastness, despite the millions of trillions of galaxies spanning out around him, the multiverse refuses to cut Remus Lupin a break.

_“P…onus…t…gineer, do y…py?”_

Remus inhales sharply around the scrimmy weight of grief working its way to the front of his face when his comm unit just barely fizzles to life. His heart leaps into his throat and he sits up again, still clutching his hands tightly around the bundle of his knees like a lifeline. “Copy, yes, engineer to Patronus, do you read me?

A heartrending moment of dead air passes before a formant of feedback eddies through the noise and an unmistakable voice cuts through just enough to lend a shred of hope;  _“Thank fuck, yes, c…py, we read y…ch jetty d..ou take?”_

Sirius’ relief is almost palpable, but Remus can’t understand beyond the interference. “Send again,” he fairly begs as he sniffles in deeply, blinking, and a track over-filled tears trips over his bottom lashes through the motion.

_“Repeat: which. J…tty. Did. You. T..ke?”_

“Charlie Foxtrot six-one-two!”

_“…S…nd again.”_

“Charlie. Foxtrot. Six. One. Two.”

Remus’ voice trembles mightily around the message and his heart pulls again with desperation when the comm goes to white static again for almost a minute. Another flutter of tears skitters down his cheeks, and even if he could reach into his helmet to swipe at them Remus is hardly movable in this vigil for contact. Sirius’ voice, even thick with static, is like a beacon, stabbing down from the sky as the light fades around him, and Remus can feel himself growing quietly frantic for the unexpected reassurance of it.

_“Patron..s to en..ineer, what is y…ur status?”_

His heart sinks slightly when Evans’ voice is the one that pipes in, likely perched at her navigator’s station, but at the very least the image of that gives Remus a shred of meager promise that the ship might steer toward him.

“Traversal suit at twenty percent and dropping. Planetside light is fading, maybe fifteen minutes of visibility left.” With a light puff of air that feels too thin after the explanation, Remus realizes his suit has begun to ration its oxygen reserves.  _Fuck._

The comm fizzles for a horrifying second, sounding almost like a disconnect, before Evans returns; _“Send ag…in.”_

“My battery is low,” Remus pronounces slowly, labored around the tight press of his tears, suppressing a shiver as he shudders and inhale, “and it’s getting dark.”

_“…Repeat, se…d aga—” Pik._

A small gasp finds its way into Remus’ helmet and faintly clouds his visor, disbelief shocking through him like and electric current. Disconnected.

_They aren’t fucking coming._

Remus bows his head to his knees, slides back against the jetty craft, and finally breaks into unguarded tears while he lets his mind list like an untethered explorer, the oxygen slowly depleting, to drag him off to sleep.

 

_………_

 

_…………_

 

_……………_

 

_………mus?_

 

_……Remus?_

It sounds somewhat like his father’s voice, all pitched with worry the way he always got when Remus would stay up too late clipped into the MMO hub in his room and fall asleep on the transport chair. Remus furrows his brow and reaches up, wanting to swat at the fingers touching his forehead, but he finds he can’t lift his arms. He settles for grunting and it comes out scratchy and patently annoyed.

_…us, are you awake?”_

Remus groans again and decides he needs to open his eyes and tell off whomever it is deciding to bother him awake. He scrunches his face and manages to squint, just barely, before sharp white-blue light slices into his eyes and makes him flinch with an offended sound. “Fuck.”

Somebody laughs, perhaps the owner of those fingers now pushed into his hair, and there’s such a note of relief in that laugh and such a familiar cadence to it that Remus can’t help but open his eyes to it again.  _Sirius._

Remus is only able to see in tiny, fussy blinks, but the blurry outline of the captain sat beside him brings with it a flood of relief Remus hadn’t known his body wanted so dearly to feel. “Where are we?”

Remus closes his eyes briefly again, but not for the violence of the lighting this time; Sirius has stroked a careful thumb along Remus’ eyebrow and Remus wants nothing more than to keep feeling the warmth of that fingerprint on his skin as affection shudders to life at his depths. “Med ward,” Sirius murmurs. “You scared us, corporal.”

“Don’t call me that. Glad ‘m not dead.”

Sirius sniffs another laugh to himself, a tiny sound that Remus almost doesn’t hear, and stands up beside the propped-up bed. “You certainly teetered a bit there.” He leans forward to press a kiss Remus’ forehead, and Remus is distantly aware that this tenderness is entirely new for him. He cracks his eyes open again and searches Sirius’ face from so near; there’s a layer of ferocity just visible behind those pale irises, and Remus covers Sirius’ hand in his hair with his own as he swallows for purchase on speech.

“Pete fucked up,” he rasps. Sirius’ eyes flash and that tailfin of passion flickers—yes, Remus had read it correctly.

“We’re aware. He’s being taken care of.”

The well-covered heaviness in Sirius’ voice is not lost of Remus, but he’s content to let it lie at that. Exhaustion pulls at his body, even as he drops his arm back to the linen covers wrapped around him and catalogues the twittering machines monitoring him. The med ward is clean, empty, and Remus remembers they’re operating a skeleton crew last he checked. Incessant responsibility quivers in his ribs and he rubs one eye as he looks back at Sirius. “Shouldn’t you be piloting, or are we just hurtling through space right now?” He yawns halfway through the question, and Sirius’ dry snort is what makes Remus feel that he’s truly back in his own body again.

“When is there ever a difference?”

Remus thinks, still addled but calm as he weakly returns the gesture, that Captain Sirius Black’s smiles could easily light up a galaxy far more effectively than an entire core of cold fusion.


	10. Sugarbones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **M**  
>  Discovering one another  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> Artist!Sirius, drifter!Remus  
> POV - Remus
> 
> A diner, a dumpster, a stupid fucking poster (but perhaps it has a point?)

__  


_JOIN A CULT — give back — start mattering_

Remus squints through the sun at the side of the dumpster as he brushes his hands off idly on the front if his apron, the recycling knocking together in a tumble of bottles and cans where Remus flung them. The sign is stark, white, scrawled in cursive and pasted on like a graffiti tag, and a web address at the bottom reads as ridiculous as anything:  _sugarbones.org._

Above him the sound of the cicadas whirring from the trees stretching up into the ink-blue sky wavers a bit when a breeze, hot and stiff like a bored sigh, shuffs through the branches and adds the skitter of leaves to the summer noise. Distantly, a bird cackles with the glitchy rattle of his song from atop a powerline. Summer sits thick over the day so far like a slathered layer of butter, and with the back of his wrist Remus pushes hair back from his forehead already beginning to pinprick with sweat.

Huh. Maybe he  _should_  join a cult.

Back in the diner kitchen, Remus glances up when Lily sweeps in to pin two more order tickets to his station. “I think I’m going to join a cult,” he calls out of the clatter of dishware.

“Blood cult or money cult?” Lily reties her ponytail with an artful twist of her wrists as though discussing the weather. Remus shrugs.

“I dunno, is there a difference?”

Lily pins her bangs back onto her forehead, looking pensive for a moment. “Probably? Let me know which one you pick though, I need a hobby. Are you coming to Mary’s thing tonight?”

Setting the side of his spatula to an impressive pile of scrambling eggs on his griddle, Remus makes a noncommittal sound. “I’ll try, but I might not make it.”

Lily scoffs and leans on the lower shelf of Remus’ plating station. She fixes him with a purposeful look through the gap in its tiers and leans in further when Remus flicks his eyes back down to the grill top. “Seriously, Remus? You  _never_  hang out anymore.”

“I have—other stuff going on!” He insists without looking back up, cracking another egg with a sizzle to match the one over-easy deviation from everyone’s incessant preference for scrambled on Lily’s fresh orders.  _This guy knows what’s good,_  Remus thinks idly at the back of his mind still sort of waking up.

“Like what?”

“Stuff.”

“‘Getting high and beating off all evening’ stuff?”

Remus ignores the way Lily’s accurate guess makes him blush and makes her burst with laughter. “Yeah, well, besides,” he says over Lily, “Mary isn’t my biggest fan.”

“She’s only that way because she’s trying to fuck you.” Lily rolls her eyes and shakes her head to herself, and Remus snorts.

“All the more reason not to go.”

_“Lily, table 6!”_

Lily looks over her shoulder before glancing back at Remus just as Remus plates part of the scrambled mass and a pile of corned beef and slides it onto the shelf between him and Lily. He dings the little serving bell for good measure, making Lily flinch and cuss at him with a little swat of her notepad. “Order up,” Remus supplies unnecessarily with a winsome grin.

“Fuck you,” Lily growls with a grin.

The rest of the morning shift at Hogsmeadow Diner goes as normal as it ever does, and by 12:00 noon Remus is pulling his rattly little car into the space outside his house. The grass out front is hurting for a clip but Remus is loathe to fix his lawnmower, so he shuffs through ankle-high grasses dotted with dandelions and seeding pods to get to his front porch. He gathers up the three empty beer bottles from last night, spent in the mute comfort of insobriety as he stared up at the stars and silently wished for a bit of a change in this dusty little life of his, before tromping in through the front door and shutting it behind him. The cool middle-dark of drawn shades is a welcome shift away from the day’s incessant boil— _July in east Texas,_  fuck the entire concept broadly and with vigor—and Remus drops the bottles into the plastic recycle bin in his kitchen before plopping down onto his couch.

He lights up, as Lily had accidentally suggested, within ten minutes.

Once he feels his regular high hit, Remus casts out for his laptop before finding it wedged between the couch cushions where he’d left it the other day. He thumbs at the edge of one of the many peeling stickers artfully plastered to it,  _ATX BIKE BOYS,_  a relic of cycling and college and all the days behind him that didn’t feel like such a chore before life hit him like a fucking truck. Remus doesn’t dwell on it though—thankfully, for the past four years, pot has helped him coast past that bullshit instead of spiraling down into it.

Yeah. Maybe a cult  _would_  be a good idea. Start over with some new people, maybe even a higher purpose? Maybe it will be a sex cult. Remus hadn’t even thought about that type. That could be…exciting? He flips open the computer and deftly, immediately, ignoring the notification emails from his loan broker for yet another day, types that silly URL into the address bar:  _sugarbones.org._

The page loads slowly on his questionable network signal, but once it loads nontheless Remus makes a curious sound out loud as he scrolls through it. It’s not a cult, it’s a portfolio page for an artist. An artist, Remus finds on the ‘About’ page, who certainly  _looks_  the part of a sex cult.

The first thing Remus’ brain latches onto is  _Hair._  Long, black hair, down just past the artist’s shoulders, ruffled and wavy and looking very soft. Remus idly runs his fingertips together on his left hand, imagining how soft it might be. The last guy he hooked up with, a closet case from Craigslist who used a stupid codename—something like Major, or Sergant, had a supremely unsatisfying crew cut. Remus has always had a thing for longer hair, and he isn’t surprised to find his interest beginning to prickle sharply under his skin as he stares at this person.

An angular tattoo is visible at the side of the artist’s neck, disappearing into the collar of a black v-neck shirt, and Remus tries not to imagine how nice one of those corded arms might feel hooked benignly over the height of his neck. He bites down on his lip and shifts his hips.  _Shit_. He hasn’t even opened his Favorites folder, and he’s already halfway there on his own just from a photo of some stranger with a weird sense of humor to their advertising.

Well. Could be worse. It could have actually been a cult.

Remus’ uninhibited resolve is finally broken by spending just a second too long staring at the grey intensity of the artist’s eyes, and he scrolls down to read about whether or not this is a person or a god incarnate right as his palm finds its way to the front of his jeans.

_Sirius Black is an illustrator, designer, and printmaker who grew up on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert. His work concentrates on nature and repurposing, as well as taking inspiration from his decaying urban surroundings._

_For booking information and contact for inquiries, click >>HERE<<_

Remus Lupin is irredeemably high, idly stroking himself through his pants, and clicking on the link to pop open his email browser without a second thought. Alright—maybe it  _would_  have been less of an issue if it had been a cult.

The email Remus drums up, one-handed, is ridiculous and yet strangely endearing at once:

_Hello, Sirius,_

_My name is Remus Lupin and I found your website on the side of a dumpster expecting a cult. I’m only kind of disappointed it wasn’t real._  
_I’m curious if you’d like to meet in person and discuss the merits of starting a real cult? You can pick the type, I’m pretty in the dark about that stuff. Apparently we could make a ton of money if we play our cards right!  
_ _I’m going to be 100% honest, I’m really high right now and I get it if you delete this message immediately. I won’t take it personally._

_Bye, sorry,  
_ _—Remus_

He blinks a few times at his typing reticle and, finding it a satisfactory encapsulation of everything he’s feeling in the moment, hits ‘Send’ with a tidy little tap of his finger.

Two hours later, after sliding off his jeans to get down to brass tacks and after a few more hits, Remus almost forgets to glance at his inbox again. It isn’t until he stands up for a glass of water that he almost upends his laptop, and when catch it awkwardly clicks his window back to his email page Remus sees one new message that, for once, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with banking. He forgets to read the sender on the newest message and almost chokes on his tongue when he opens it up:

_Howdy, Remus—_

_A cult, you say? Sounds like a plan. I could use the extra cash. Could be fun ;)_  
_Would that by chance be the dumpster by Hogsmeadow Diner? If I’m remembering correctly I got shat on by a grackle when I was posting that one. Must be good luck.  
_ _Here, shoot me a text message at my number below. I try to keep this account clear for art chatter, and this new enterprise sounds promising._

_—s_

_P.s. might want to keep your photo out of your email signature in the future, hot stuff, you never know what kind of pervs are lurking on 1234 Internet Street. xx_

Remus stares, unblinking, for several long seconds at the reply.  _Holy shit._  Nevermind the fact that he’s continually forgotten to change his email signature back from the stupid little foray into a woodworking business he tried starting three years ago, but Hot Artist  _replied_  to him.

“What the fuck,” Remus asks to his empty little house. The eaves respond by creaking very slightly, and another warbling burst of birdsong slips in through Remus’ windows. The heights of the season continue on around outside, and Remus stares at his computer screen while contemplating the merits of packing another bowl to shut up his very-suddenly racing and riotous thoughts.

It‘a about to be, he senses with a tug in his stomach, a very interesting latter half of summer indeed.


	11. Growing Pains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Post-Azkaban  
> Canon compliant
> 
> POV - Remus
> 
> A pair of scissors, a very small water closet, the feeling that thing are different now.
> 
>  
> 
> [ _[Written for this achy-good piece of art by the lovely gin-draws]_ ](https://gin-draws.tumblr.com/post/183913247780/haircut)

“Just don’t fuck it up and make me look like Shirley Temple.”

Remus bites down a steely snort of a laugh, worries his bottom lip between his teeth and stares through the scissors in his hand. “And how do you know who Shirley Temple is?”

“The pub down the street from us had public access on that shitty television, remember?”

Deciding not to dive to closely into what the two of them  _had_ , Remus heaves a light sigh to himself. “Sure. But you don’t even have curly hair, so you can rest easy.”

 _Rest easy._  What a silly phrase to apply to Sirius Orion Black, recent escapee and current hideaway at Remus Lupin’s hideous shack in some northern hovel artfully scrubbed from the face of topography everywhere, magical or not. The perfect place for a presumed murderer to hide—the perfect place to quietly and accidentally rehash twelve years of absence and decaying fondness that, no matter how hard he’s tried to kill it over time, still burns fiercely at Remus’ core.

“If I had curly hair, I’d have kept it shaved short my whole life.” Sirius’ voice now is like sharpened ice, Remus realizes as he prepares to take up Sirius’ hair in his hands for the first time in far too long. It’s cold and jagged at all of its edges, only harboring evidence of his former warmth if Remus really squints at the sound and pretends that it’s there. It hurts his ears. He stops focusing so intently and sighs again.

“‘Shaved short.’ I don’t think you truly want that, you want it to your shoulders?”

Remus clenches his jaw and slips his fingers into Sirius’ hair, long and thick and just as lovely as his patchy dreams have dared to let him remember over the last decade. It’s a duller black like dawn-dark, greyer than Remus can remember it compared to the memories of youth—the midnight near-blue that used to shimmer across Sirius’ shoulders when he would smirk at Remus across a classroom or pile atop his head like a diadem in repose at their old flat—

“No.”

Blinking once, yanked out of reverie, Remus realizes he has the hair wrapped through his fingers as though detailing a worry stone with a trembling touch. He swallows. “Want it a little longer than that?”

“No.” Sirius’ back is tense, and when he shakes his head it pulls the hair across Remus’ hand in a slipping sluice, black sand through an hourglass, and suddenly Remus wants to clench it all in his fist and hold fast to it to keep time standing still in this strange present in which they’ve found one another again but neither knows exactly where to go from here—here, this tiny little box of a loo with Sirius propped on the edge of the bath and Remus standing dumb with his trimming scissors like a wand at half-ready. Sirius’ shoulders slope slightly with his own sigh; “Cut it all off.”

Remus nods to himself, mustering courage in one breath, and gathers Sirius’ hair into a long, loose ponytail. He twists it once around itself, a black and bedraggled rope seemingly pulled up from the depths of the North Sea to pull Sirius’ own body up with it, a foreign body Remus knows at once like his own pulse and yet of which he can hardly make heads or tails with all those spidering tattoos and the gauntness he’s never seen beneath that skin—Remus twists the hair into a section he can slice off in one go and readies his scissors. “No turning back, you’re sure?”

When Sirius sniffs a bitter chuckle to himself, Remus tries not to feel the sudden press of emotion at the back of his throat for the sodden exhaustion that rings through it. “I’m sure, Moony.”

With that, the rebirth of the name nobody has called him since his world shattered in the middle of an autumn so red he thought he might never see straight again, Remus blinks a tear out of one eye and lets out a low breath. His scissors close around Sirius’ hair in a hiss, and time ticks invisibly over into the start of something largely unknown and slightly terrifying for all its silent potential.


	12. Loud and Avowed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  MWPP Hogwarts era  
> Canon compliant
> 
> POV - Sirius
> 
> The Stooges, some thoughts, a shared cigarette.

Remus has been sharing a lot of music lately with their dormitory.

Sirius likes to think (selfishly, and with a bit of aimless eagerness, for what? Attention?) that it started in earnest just a few months ago when he, stark-drunk on Hallow’s Eve, plainly proclaimed  _I would nail Robert Plant like a fucking portrait._  Zeppelin had been on Fenwick’s turntable, loud and angular and shrieking-lovely; James had cackled, Pete had rolled his eyes, and Remus had choked on a swallow of Dragon Barrel—with his ears going pink, if Sirius had been able to notice beyond sharing James’ sawing laughter.

After then, through the past few weeks of studying and grumbling and the general not-sleeping of this particular chapter of year six, Remus has been playing far more records than usual in their room. It’s all Muggle music, music that Sirius is finding he prefers more and more to their wizarding counterparts—The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Doors, more Zeppelin ( _Look here!_  Sirius had cried, jabbing a finger at the liner notes for “Black Dog,”  _They wrote one about me!_ )—and the last trip back to visit his parents in Wexford saw Remus returning to the common room with his arms full of records. Presently, as Sirius watches him calmly over the top of a book whose page he hasn’t turned in ten minutes, Remus does the heart-looping thing of his in which he very reverently prepares a record to spin on the portable box that Pete had charmed with a tidy little amplifying charm.

Remus slips the LP out of a fiery-orange sleeve, its title obscured but its edges quite well-worn from, doubtless, many listens. He holds the vinyl up flat to the daylight, looking at its surface as thought it has lots of tiny secrets to tell him, and turns it slightly side to side before lowering it gingerly onto the slip mat. He runs the edge of what he dutifully taught Sirius is called the dust brush around its circumference, exacting and slow to catch every groove, and takes one more moment to make sure the record is as clean as he can do without magic before nodding to himself and flicking the Play button with the tip of his thumb.

The needle meets plastic in a fuzzy hiss right as Remus catches Sirius staring. He smiles to himself, that little tug of a sideways grin of his, newly seamed with a thin little scar on his bottom lip from last month that healed into a pale white thread. “Can I help you?”

“Who have you queued?” Sirius shuts the book and ignores the way his mouth’s gone a bit dry. Remus sits back onto his own bed, the turntable between them beneath their shared window casement, and proffers the record sleeve over to Sirius.

“ _Funhouse_ , one of the best albums of the last decade.” He says it with authority that sounds inherited, a very Remus Lupin-brand surety that clearly came from someone else. Sirius snorts genially, turning the sleeve over in his hands to look at the moody photos of bandmates Remus has coached him through a few times before: Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, Dave Alexander, peppered along the front matter.

“What, your father’s?” Sirius hums when the first hits of rapacious, noisy, backbeat electric splendor begin rumbling from the record player. He almost misses the smirk Remus throws at him, but he catches the tail end of it with a strange pulling behind his ribs to also see Remus leaning over to dig his tobacco and papers out from the top drawer of the dresser beneath the turntable.

“My mother’s.”

“Get the fuck out, your  _mum?”_  Sirius chuckles with disbelief over Iggy’s moody exaltations,  _Down on the street where the faces shine / Floatin’ around, I’m a real low mind / See a pretty thing / Ain’t no wall / See a pretty thing / It ain’t no wall!_  He can’t help but shoot over his own grin when Remus smiles at him. Remus sprinkles a thin line of tobacco into the valley of a paper vee’d between his middle and fore fingers, taking his time to roll it closed and lick it shut before perching it at the corner of his lips and raising an eyebrow at Sirius.

“I’ll have you know, Hope Lupin was a very loud and avowed feminist back in her day.”

“Somehow I have a hard time imagining your mother railing against any system that isn’t organized finance,” Sirius japes as he watches Remus light and draw on his fresh cigarette. He gestures for his own drag of it and is met with exaggerated doubt from Remus.

“What, you can’t see her in all her second-wave glory, front row and rowdy at some great, screaming show?”

Sirius rolls his eyes, the terms of Muggle politics lost to him although he’d never admit it. “I suppose you’re right, I’ve never been scolded by her. Does it come out in earnest then?”

Remus laughs and Sirius can’t hold in his own smile, victorious, taking the cigarette as Remus passes it to him. They share the smoke in peace for a few more lines of the song, almost uncomfortably timely for Sirius’ stupid innards— _Yeah deep in the night, I’m lost in love / A thousand lights / Look at you / A thousand lights / Look at you_ —before Remus pipes up again. He’s lain long across his bed, the ankles of his trousers riding a bit higher through his latest growth spurt, catching up to Sirius with alarming speed, and hisses out a plume of smoke. “She told me once that if you don’t feel like fighting somebody after listening to this record, then you’re listening to it wrong.”

“Is that it then, Moony, you want to fight me?”

Sirius means for it to be pure jest, a jab at the ribs with the blunt elbow of his tone, but something catches in his throat and makes it just a bit too high behind his vocal cords; the words pull with an accidental stretch of emotion, enigmatic, a veiled metaphor for the sort of confused  _What Are We?_  that he so badly wants to ask Remus lately as they’ve both blushed and stuttered through the motions of growing closer—brushing hands, lingering arms thrown around shoulders, grins and cast eyes holding just a bit longer now than they once did. Remus swallows, visibly rattled, and this time Sirius notices the soft red that rises at Remus’ throat.

“Well, you know I’d win,” he murmurs. He holds the cigarette out to Sirius, end-first, with something like challenge written in that woodsy stare of his; Sirius has and likely always will feel very bare under those eyes. He takes it and sucks on the smoke with hollowed cheeks, blows it through the cracked window, and twitches a shrug onto one shoulder.

“I’m still taller though.”

“That has nothing to do with anything!”

“Nah, I’d win.” Sirius crows it with a toss of his hair and, unexpectedly, cuts his gaze to Remus when Remus breaks with laughter. It’s got more gold in its sound that usual—Remus’ voice is lowering lately like a smooth descent into cool earth, and Sirius has been trying to ignore what it does to his guts. He fails. Remus grins at him and holds up a hand to let Sirius kill the cigarette when Sirius lamely offers the smoke instead of being able to speak.

“Fine then, but you have to listen to the whole album first.” Remus nets his fingers behind his head and sighs to himself, settling back against his pillows and shutting his eyes. His eyelashes fall long across the tops of his cheeks, the way they do when Sirius wakes beside him in the shack each month curled up like kits in a storm, and Sirius allows himself the luxury of staring, fully, in the privacy of unsight. “If you listen properly and still want to fight, we’ll take this out to the lakeside.”

“Ta,” Sirius all but wheezes, shuts himself up on the very last draw of tobacco. Remus opens one eye to smirk at him again, something maddeningly knowing sitting just behind his pupils, and in that moment Sirius knows he’s done for;  _I took a record of pretty music / I went down and baby, you can tell / I took a record of pretty music / Now I’m putting it to you straight from hell; / I’ll stick it deep inside / I’ll stick it deep inside / ‘Cause I’m loose!_ —oh, indeed.  _Fuck._

This is inconvenient. But, Sirius finds, he can’t find it in him to worry much beyond the beat of his pulse mixing sweetly with the record spinning beside them in this shared comfort, spinning away like smoke through the window and the sigh of contentment that Remus huffs from just two short steps away.


	13. Sangre, Sudor, y Lluvia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-cute  
> American West/Early 20th-century AU
> 
> Cowboy!Sirius, painter!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> Dust, more dust, and a clear-eyed stranger north of Santa Fe

“Una tequila.”

In the late afternoon, the sun bends in a purple clutch around the Sangres outside. It is 1915, high July, and Sirius Black has arrived for the night in Taos after a long ride from nowhere.

The barkeep slides him a stout glass, slightly dusty even after being wiped clean—everything here is dusty, most likely even Sirius’ throat, especially the dark brim of his hat—that Sirius downs in a single swallow. The barkeep raises an eyebrow at him, short dark hair slicked to the side, small mustache tidy above his lip,  _And which branch of the Spanish transplants do you come from?_  Sirius thinks to himself, leaning on the bartop to tip up the brim of his hat and smile like a rattler. “Hola.”

“Good evening, sir, have you wine?”

Sirius pauses, slides his eyes to the right, tugged over by some sudden instinct to hear the question on a voice too soft to be born from the trail. He’s right—the man come up to stand beside him, both hands touching lightly at the bar, one hand knocking softly with soundless knuckles as though excitement fills him for some reason, is a clean-shaven portrait of delicacy. His suit is an immaculate tan paired off with a crisp blue tie, of course just a bit dusty but perfectly-tailored nonetheless, and his hair is pomaded into a part so clean that Sirius would bet both his pistol and his bear gun on the fact this man has never worn a Stetson.

The barkeep looks relieved to be pulled away from Sirius’ solitary attention. “We do, only red. Is that alright?”

“More than fine, thank you.”

The dandy-man, or well-dressed enough to be one, stays standing as he waits on his drink. Sirius circles his empty glass between his fingers for about three seconds before he shifts to lean one arm on the bar and smile his finest trade-trail smile. “Passing through, or here to stay?”

Mild surprise looks well on this stranger, pulling a pair of startling green eyes over to Sirius while that soft-looking mouth of his twitches into a pursed half-shape of arrested thought. “Sorry?”

“Are you on your way to somewhere else, or staying at the Inn for a while?”

Sirius lets the man look at him, nodding once at the barkeep when he returns with a full-bellied glass of dark wine—dusty—to summon another sharp shot of tequila. He knows he looks the perfect opposite to his unexpected drinking companion, all trapper-rough from his ride down from Durango; chaps scuffed, boots muddied, spurs caked with dirt, stubble long for his simple uncare for shaving for the last two days. Besides, his hand mirror cracked somewhere between Pagosa Springs and Tierra Amarilla, and the only way he could have traded for a replacement along the way had been coming across pockets of Tiwa people with no need for an Anglo’s attempt at mimed bartering.

“Oh, I’m staying for a little while. Are you—do you know Mister Sharp?” The stranger’s eyes light up just a bit, and Sirius’ penchant for pretty things flares in his belly at the sight. He receives his second tequila and sips it this time instead of shooting it.

“I haven’t had the honor, no.”

The stranger looks back at his wine glass, worrying it between his fingers just a little, almost bashful with the movement in a way that makes Sirius feel another sharp twist of fondness. “Sorry,” he sighs, “I’ve been mistaking everyone in this town for another artist.”

“And I look like an artist to you?” Sirius’ brows go up, his arms spread casually, looking down with doubtful dramatics at his own getup. The man laughs a bit, exactly had Sirius had hoped, and Sirius shakes his head. “Unless you’d consider trapping an art, no sir. But I take it you are?”

“Yes, I’m in from Philadelphia actually.” The man shifts to sit on the stool behind him, and Sirius follows to take his own seat as he whistles low.

“That’s a  _long_ way away,” drawing out the word on the ‘n,’ his mutt’s accent of Spanish and Native and whatever shredded pieces of Mexico made it into his blood before he scrambled north as a boy and never looked back mingling in with his Americano drawl. “Isn’t it usually better to be an artist in a big city? What are you doing here with all the mountains and the dust?”

“That’s just it.”

The movement to sip on his next taste of drink stops on his lips, Sirius’ eyes flicking up to look at the stranger as his voice sharpens just enough to make Sirius’ heart twist. The well-dressed man bites down his bottom lip and stares out the open window behind Sirius, at the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains that Sirius knows are dyed a rich red at this hour, before he continues; “I’m a naturalist, I paint landscapes. I was told the land out here was beautiful, but nothing really prepared me for it.”

Sirius quells the humming in his lungs, something quick and hot and wholly startling as he watches the strangers lips while he speaks, with another sip of tequila. “When did you arrive?”

“Three days ago.”

“What for, just to leave the east?”

The stranger’s eyes flash again, as though a candle behind his pupils is telegraphing every feeling in that pretty, proper body of his, with unexpected ferocity. “I hated it there.” He cools marginally when Sirius’ expression likely telegraphs vague surprise. “I—as you can expect, there isn’t much about the city that’s very natural. I had to take trips up north, and even then it was all still so…developed. But  _this?”_  The man gestures to the same window, over Sirius’ shoulder, looking as though he’s staring at something holy out there in the sunset. “This is another  _world,_  just begging to be painted.”

Sirius sketches a toast at the man, his head nodding in a short, low bow with the motion; he glances at the man’s shoes. While, of course, dusty, they’re well-heeled and carefully polished. The very subtle envy of comfort gnaws at Sirius’ back. “You seem as though you’ve found a good spot then. Welcome to the west, mister…?”

The stranger smiles a quiet sort of smile, half-confused and half-amused. Sirius’ throat dries up a bit more than usual, as though he’s swallowed gravel. “Lupin. Remus Lupin.” He holds up his wine glass to mimic Sirius’ toast and takes a sip, through which Sirius’ trapper-quick awareness notices him take a full look up and down Sirius’ stature. Sirius grins and holds out a hand.

“Sirius Black.”

His own calloused palm is met with the fine-boned softness of a hand that has never known hard labor in its life, but a peculiar sort of strength grips him when they share a solid handshake. Sirius smiles that same rattler smile, and he’s well impressed to find that Remus returns a what looks for a moment like a hare’s grin only to see a wolf’s instead when he tilts his chin just so.

 _Begging to be painted_  indeed.


	14. Boneblack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T/M** _(suggestive themes)_  
>  Meet-ugly-and-also-horny  
> Fantasy AU
> 
> Monster hunter!Sirius, nightmare god!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> A contract, a hut, a man who can't possibly be just a man.
> 
>  
> 
> [ _[NOW WITH INSANELY COOL ART BY ARTY, LIKE HOLY WOW???? DID I DESERVE THIS??!???! QUESTIONABLE. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT ISN'T QUESTIONABLE? THIS FUCKEN ART. I LOVE IT.]_ ](https://artymakeart.tumblr.com/post/184909459972/au-where-sirius-is-a-monster-hunter-or-something)

He’s getting too old for this shit.

Usually it’s maidens who have invited some ritual darkness into their bedchambers, knowing _exactly_  what that spell does—Sirius doesn’t buy their pity-posturing for a moment, pretending to be surprised when he explains with his tattooed hand leashing the minor lust demon that this entity they’ve summoned will, eventually, fuck them into mindless, loll-eyed submission. In not so many words. And he gets it; usually the poor girl’s parents are standing there, teary-eyed and shocked, and  _It must have possessed our girl to summon it! Kill it right now!_  So, every time, he lies that the banishment ritual must be done in secret for it to work before binding up the creature in one of his empty clay pots, stalking out to the warded clearing beyond his hut, and releasing the creature back into the aether.

Seven times out of ten, the girl tries again in a month. Or maybe it’s eight? At least it’s good coin.

But this? This is ridiculous.

The mark is, undeniably, gorgeous. He’s got a crop of satiny-looking curls slouching over one green-gold eye so perfectly opposite the collar slipping open at his throat to bare a plane of golden skin that it can’t be accidental. It  _can’t_ be. Nobody is that alluring on their own when they simply open a door—but perhaps it’s the cursed blood doing it for him.

“I’ve a summons for one Remus Lupin,” Sirius says, stony voice put on with his best Order of Eki rumble-pitch to it, holding up the vellum stamped with the mayor’s own sigil. Back in his heyday, Sirius would have approached with the wax embossment of a duke or even a king—but lately it’s municipalities or nothing. People are getting surprisingly more comfortable with the edges of darker forces nudging into their lives than they used to be, and Sirius wouldn’t have a single moral qualm with that if it didn’t mean he lost out on an alarming number of smaller contracts anymore. He takes work where he can get it.

The mark, Remus, leans against the door jamb and crosses his arms. This slips his tunic even further to trip down over the curve of his shoulder, collarbone jutting almost rude with its careless beauty, and Sirius’ tattooed fingers tighten on the vellum with a very soft crunch. “Who’s asking?”

“The mayor of Aberrial and a priest of the Order of Eki.” Sirius draws the sun-shaped medallion up from his belt, hanging shortly there beside his bag of salts, and holds his glare. Remus only raises an eyebrow.

“And?”

Sirius glances at the vellum, thinking maybe it had gone blank between receiving it from the mayor and making the long, twisting trip into the wood to find this lone cabin. “And,” he says, teeth more than slightly gritted, “you are accused of lycanthropy. I am to perform a series of tests, and if you fail even one of them you are sentenced to death by expulsion of ungodly darkness.”  _Fuck, did I get that right? Ungodly? Or is it unholy? Who fucking cares._

Instead of breaking with fear, falling to his knees to beg forgiveness or offer a counter-payment to Sirius in exchange for bringing back some other creature’s poor carcass as proof of a completed job, Remus only snorts, turning back to a dinner still steaming on his table to resume a meal clearly interrupted. He doesn’t shut the door. “Alright,” he says over his shoulder, “come in then.”

Sirius steps in and toes the door shut behind him himself, throwing the cabin into cool darkness with night pressing in from outside. He tucks the summons back into his carrying satchel before setting it to the ground heavily and retrieving the silver bar within. Sirius sits in the single chair opposite Remus at his small wooden table while the accused werewolf eats, unphased, as though Sirius were over to discuss the pattern of crop growth in the area instead of read his blood for signs of corruption.

“Touch it.” Without preamble, Sirius extends the silver bar across the table. Remus calmly finishes chewing a bite of blackened meat from his fork, tidily sets his utensils down, and wipes his mouth with a faded blue cloth beside his plate. He shifts in his chair, seeming to get comfortable, and quirks an ichor-sweet smile over at Sirius with something vaguely stubborn behind it before reaching up and grabbing the silver with his entire palm.

His skin begins hissing almost immediately.

Sirius watches with a combination of disgust and distant awe as Remus tightens his grip, holding on for several long seconds, his palm going red and then char-black, surely causing him a realm of torturous pain, but all the while his face holds only a very slight twitch of discomfort as though he’s found a spider in his sugar bowl. When he lets go, he holds up the ruined patch of skin to show Sirius a veritable horror of flesh burnt down almost to the bone. “Oh no,” Remus hums flatly.

Before Sirius can move to make any of the necessary finger symbols for binding a dark creature, a soft tingling warble begins to pool in the air around Remus’ hand. In a matter of moments, Remus’ palm begins healing with hyper-quick strands of flesh stretching to patch over the ragged, burnt hole left behind by the silver. Sirius stares, his pulse picking up sharply, and can only clench his jaw when Remus flexes his unblemished fingers a few times and nod to himself before turning back to his dinner.

“What the fuck are you,” a threatening whisper low in Sirius’ ribs that would cow any lesser creature into spilling every secret compacted in its sorry little body. Remus doesn’t even look up from his plate.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says around the last bite of meat.

Without warning, Sirius snatches up the plate between them and hurls it across the tiny cabin. It shatters against the back of the hearth, raining bits of pottery into the low-burning fire and collapsing one of the skinny charcoaled logs in a cloud of mute sparks, and for the first time Remus flinches. Sirius clenches his consecrated hand into a warning fist, the lines of tattoos spidering along his fingers beginning to glow the blue-white of Eki’s divine rite. “What. The fuck.  _Are you,”_ he repeats in a hiss.

Remus brushes invisible crumbs from his lap and stands, which Sirius mirrors in a tight motion that sees his chair rocking faintly on its uneven legs behind him. Remus turns to face away from Sirius and unceremoniously pulls his tunic off over his head.

The wolven face of Inguma snarls silently at him in a black brand that takes up Remus’ entire back. Sirius’ breath tightens to see it, the deity that goes against every tenet Sirius’ order is mean to stand for, the god of nightmares etched into the skin of such an otherwise enticing body— _Stop, no, focus on the contract._

“It’s not just lycanthropy,” Remus is saying when Sirius snaps back to the present. Sirius’ left hand is already in his pouch of salts when Remus turns around again, the front plane of his body thankfully unmarked; or, rather, distractingly unmarked, for Sirius can see the curve of very faint stomach muscles and a peppering of chestnut curls along Remus’ chest from here. Sirius leaps back to his weak defense of frowning again.

“I can fucking see that. What, did you make a deal with him? Let him eat your nightmares for the rest of your life and what, spread his doctrine?”

Remus smiles at that, a smooth smile, much more earnest than the Here We Go Then grin he’d given before handling the silver. It parts his pretty lips to show white teeth that seem for some reason as though they should be pointed. Sirius swallows. Remus looks him up and down and runs his tongue along one eyetooth.

“Well. Can’t make a deal with a god if I  _am_ the god.”


	15. High Maintenance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-cute  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> Down-on-his-luck!Remus, maintenance worker!Sirius  
> POV - Remus
> 
> A sink, a cat, accidentally thinking out loud.

As if a shit week couldn’t get any worse, the sink shudders with a very loud and violent rattle before sputtering an ugly rust-colored spatter of decidedly  _ not _ water. 

“Fuck!” Remus leaps back, toothbrush yanked away from the spout in a flash. From several paces away, a curious little meow warbles up from behind him. He sighs. “It’s okay, Minnie. This fucking apartment is coming down around our ears though, isn’t it?”

Minnie replies with another  _ blurp _ of confirmation, her own brand of tired resignation sitting thick in the sound if Remus listens just so. She slinks in gracefully around the doorframe, the sink still rattling with heaving wheezes from its plumbing, to blink up at Remus with those wide, yellow eyes on her tabby face. Remus looks at her in commiseration through the mirror as he wrests the tap shut again and quiets the racket. “Agreed. Another brush-teeth-at-the-kitchen-sink night, let’s go.”

Remus Lupin has been living in this shit-tier apartment for about four months now, and he’s faced more problems with the bathroom in particular than he ever thought possible. Moving clear across the country for a job he only sort of wanted to a city in which he knows absolutely nobody after the most disastrous breakup he ever thought possible has proved to be, in one word, rough. The plumbing isn’t helping. 

He’s filed about seven-and-a-half maintenance reports since signing his 12-month lease, four for the sink and the other three-ish for the shower. Leaks, stoppages, strange sounds, the whole nine yards—at least the toilet hasn’t been acting up. He’s come home each time to a neat little  _ While You Were Out _ slip of paper on the kitchen counter, filled out with a cramped and slanting hand of check marks and the initials SB to certify that his plumbing should be back in order for the couple of days or weeks of easement Remus gets until it all starts falling apart again. Remus is only glad he doesn’t have to pay for these repairs himself. Fuck renting, but at least none of the worst of it is on his dime. 

He texts the leasing hotline for his maintenance request the next morning, drowsy and still abed after sleeping in later than usual on a Saturday. The confirmation reply  _ ping _ ’s several seconds later, and, flapping his sheets off in some great sail of exasperation, Remus takes it as his cue to get the hell out of bed and get moving.

Remus is setting Minerva’s breakfast on the kitchen floor about twenty minutes later when a sharply efficient knock comes from the door. His hand is already on the knob and twisting, still mostly waking up, when he realizes he’s wearing nothing but compression shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. “Shit,” he hisses, door swinging open, his first word to the maintenance person standing on his doorstep. Remus blinks.  _ Shit. _

He’s gorgeous. Long, dark hair twisted up in a knot on top of his head; corded arms threaded with lithe tattoos barely reigned under the sleeves of a worn work shirt; a toolbelt, a  _ fucking toolbelt, _ slung low on his hips; well-trod boots with thick soles, extremely likely to be steel-toed. Remus is blushing, he knows he’s blushing. He focuses on the man’s face and tries not to whimper out a weak and approving greeting, leaning slightly to hide behind the door as subtly as possible. 

“Oh, hey, you’re home!” 

Remus blanches. The man is smiling at him with his hand outstretched, and the only thought Remus can faithfully process in the moment is that he’s got perfect teeth. “G’morning,” he mumbles, taking the offered hand and shaking—his grip is strong and warm, and Remus ignores that fact  _ bodily. _

“Sink again? Y—oh  _ hello, _ princess!”

The maintenance man’s face lights up and he drops Remus’ hand, leaving Remus confused and guessing when the man sinks into a crouch. Minerva’s collar bell tinkles happily and she lets out a little chirp from behind the door, slipping her way through Remus’ ankles to rub along the man’s legs and purr up at him. He scratches immediately under her chin, making little cooing nonsense sounds—Remus is suddenly trying very hard not to melt. “That—uh, that’s Minnie, she’s super friendly most of the time.”

“Minnie!” The maintenance man continues fawning over the cat, glancing up at Remus with a handsome smile that has Remus thinking of the beach just a few blocks away and a cold drink and— _ No, stop it, STOP it.  _ “She’s been my assistant whenever I’ve been here when you’re out, she might actually be reaching journeyman status at this point. Isn’t that right, Minnie?”

Minerva meows at him matter-of-factly, as though demanding her own certificate. Remus winces slightly. “Ah, sorry, I hope she hasn’t bothered you. I always try to corral her when I know maintenance is coming by, but she’s an escape artist.”

The maintenance man laughs and scoops Minerva into his arms, easy as anything, as the little ham herself curls comfortably into a lounge across those award-worthy forearms. Not for the first time, Remus is acutely jealous of his cat. “No problem at all, I love cats,” the man hums. Remus feels his face heat up again just moments before he comes to his senses and opens the door wider with a stuttering yank.

“It—well, yeah, it’s the sink again,” he babbles. The maintenance man steps in after him, still cuddling Minerva—she peeks around his shoulder at Remus as if to say  _ Don’t make an idiot of yourself, we like this one. _ Remus scowls at her briefly. “Spewing, uh, some sort of mud, or rust.”

The man turns to face Remus again, and Remus notices his name tag says  _ SIRIUS _ . Huh.  _ Explains the initials. _  What might the B stand for? Beecher? Brown? Beefcake, most likely.

Minerva meows approvingly, likely hearing Remus’ thoughts.

“Well, Minnie what do you say we get fixin’?” Sirius sings into the top of her head, peppering her ears with quick kisses. Remus’ insides are screaming with adoration as Sirius looks up at him and laughs. “Sorry, I’ll quit being a freak and fix your sink.”

“No, it’s—no, you can play with her all you want! She loves it.” Remus flails an ungraceful hand at Minerva, eyes shut in bliss with her ears flattened and purring loud enough to wake the dead.  _ I’d be doing the same thing wrapped in arms like that, little lady, _ he thinks. 

Oh, fuck.

“Thank you,” Sirius says around a surprised chuckle. Remus pales. His tendency to lose his filter when he isn’t entirely awake gas fone him in yet again, speaking his thoughts without meaning to. He chews his lip. 

“Sorry.”

Sirius smiles to himself, petting Minerva between the ears. “Ain’t no sorry.” They stand there in the living room, the only completely comfortable one among them the fucking cat, before Sirius gestures at the bathroom. “So, uh, sink?”

“Sink,” Remus blurts. God, he’s probably red as an apple right now. “Yes, right in there. You know the drill.”  _ Oh my fuck, stop talking RIGHT NOW. _

“Indeed I do,” Sirius hums, smiling down at Minerva as he carries her over to the little closet of a bathroom.

If he throws another grin over his shoulder at Remus, the kind that might be testing the waters if Remus were awake enough to do any higher thinking beyond  _ Arms, eyes, teeth, tools, FUCK,  _ Remus construes it as simple politeness. 

Within the hour, after the sink is fixed and Remus shouts a pleasant farewell from the self-imposed humiliation jail of his tiny bedroom, Remus plods out to pour a glass of water from the newly-fixed tap. The maintenance slip is completed and tidy on top of the toilet tank, and Minerva bounds up to sit on the lip of the tub and watch as Remus squints at it. 

“Oh, you evil little genius,” he murmurs at the cat, a reluctant grin seeping onto his mouth at he sees the phone number scratched in under  _ Further Comments _ beside a lopsided little smiley face; “You get a week of that fancy canned shit for this.”


	16. Powder Hound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-ugly  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> ski patrol!Remus, adrenaline junkie!Sirius  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> A shitty mogul, a gnarly fall, a surprisingly resonant tattoo.

Not good, not good, this is NOT good at all.

Sirius’ entire left thigh burns like a motherfucker and he squeezes his eyes shut, teeth gritted as his hissing Please-Quit-Hurting-Please-Shit-Please-Fucking-Moguls-Fuck breath sears through his teeth. The snow beneath his back is pillowy and cold, his arms splayed like a half-assed snow angel and his feet sticking out and pinioned up by the tips of his skis.

_ Shit.  _ This was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.

The drone of the ski patrol snowmobile fades in after a while of this horrible anti-zen of trying to push away the pain, the puttery engine whine skating in over the distant drone of the chairlift and the soft whisper of the trees standing out above Sirius like judgmental hulks of Mother Nature’s pointing fingers themselves;  _ Look what happens when you try to push yourself, _ the tops of the pines seem to say. Sirius huffs a dry, humorless chuckle up at the slate-white of the sky. “Yeah,” he grates, his leg burning something terrible fierce, “fuck you too.”

“That—hi, that’s one of the more unique greetings I’ve gotten.”

Sirius’ heart leaps up to his throat and he looks over to his right, his hat skewing and mussing his hair as he turns. The patroller cuts the snowmobile’s engine and dismounts with a sure-footed leap before he crouches down beside Sirius. He pulls his goggles up, his lower face still obscured by the swath of his scarf, and Sirius is struck dumb for a moment to face a pair of sharp brown eyes.  _ Fuck. _ He’s supposed to look fucking cool when he meets cute guys on the ski runs, not be splayed out like some greenhorn asshole who can’t even finish a freestyle run.

“Your friend told us where to find you, he made it sound like you were paralyzed. Are you paralyzed?”

Trying to shoulder off the hum of attraction brewing in the pit of his belly at nothing but a pair of  _ eyes, _ Sirius snorts. “James tends to overreact. He’s a med student.”

The ski patroller raises his eyebrows and widens his eyes a little in an expression that communicates the perfect pitch of  _ Ah Yes _ before he hooks a finger down around the edge of his scarf covering his nose. “Yep. You’re hurt though, can you tell me where?”

“Left thigh.” Sirius looks down and gestures at it with his chin, getting another handful of powder mixed in with the loose ends of his hair before propping himself up on his elbows with a mighty wince. 

The ski patroller lays a gloved hand on Sirius’ shoulder immediately. “Whoa, hey, no moving ‘til we figure out how to get you onto the agony wagon without making this worse. Did you land badly on it, or did you pull something? Did you feel anything break?”

Another bolt of mute awe pins Sirius straight through the chest when he looks over at the patroller again to see his pink-cheeked face fully bared to visibility without his scarf—a handsome and slightly-aquiline nose, freckles sprayed across it like a spatter of snow, and the prettiest fucking mouth Sirius has ever seen in his life. Sirius swallows around a dry tongue and nods once, forgetting for a moment that he’s in staggering pain. “Yeah, okay, it—uh, no break, just a...a muscle thing, I think. Took a mogul badly, fell on my side pretty th—pretty hard.”

“Do you mind if I take a look? I know it’s cold, sorry, we’ll get you wrapped up in just a sec.”

Sirius works his jaw shut around something along the lines of  _ Take as many looks as you want, gorgeous, _ settling instead for another pale nod. “Sure.”

He’s suddenly very aware of the fact that he looks like a disheveled mess, splayed out almost in the same position here in the crater of powder he made upon falling initially before rolling over and shouting for James to  _ Go get the fucking patrol! _ Sirius feels the cold leeching in against his bare skin where his parka has ridden up from all his shuffling and shifting to try and ease the fiery pain by his hip, and he remembers to be self-conscious about it right as the patroller makes an intrigued little sound that has absolutely no business being so alluring from here.

“I take it the spill didn’t give you a very specific...rope pattern on your side, did it?”

Sirius feels the beet-red combination of embarrassment and giddiness flare up on his face as he bites down his lip and shakes his head. “Nah,” he all but wheezes, “that’s—that one’s mine.”

Unless it’s in the comfortable dark of the local scene, Sirius is never wont to let his affinity for shibari be something beautiful people find out about him before he even says his own fucking name. But sometimes Mother Nature really is awful and makes an adorable ski patroller look at that patch of skin—a beautiful flow of twisting ropes and knots that goes all the way from his left hip down the full length of his thigh rendered by Lily’s expert tattooist hand several years back to mark his permanent move into town, and of  _ course  _ it’s the thigh the medics are going to have to examine,  _ fuck _ —with something that looks from here like poorly-covered approval. But, that could also just be the patently stupid levels of pain racketing throughout Sirius’ body on top of the thrill.

“Didn’t get your name,” the patroller says with, what, is that a hint of excitement sitting there in the little twitch of his lips as he touches very carefully at Sirius’ knee?

“Sirius,” offered on a dry and fairly pale fucking hum as Sirius silently prays to all that’s holy he doesn’t get hard splayed out in the snow and immobilized.

“Alright, Sirius, let’s get you back down the run.” The patroller turns for a moment to prep the stretcher bed on the snowmobile before coming back, his face tipped down toward Sirius at a shockingly sweet angle—the firs framing him like a dream, something flashing in those eyes and playing on that smile that Sirius has only ever noticed in people with whom he has proceed to get along  _ exceedingly _ well—and Sirius forgets for just a moment that most of his body is screaming with white pain. “I’m Remus. Now let’s get tied up, yeah?”

Sirius’ chest clenches with euphoria and he sputters when Remus begins slipping his shoulder under Sirius’ bad side to brace him.  _ “What?” _

“I—I’m Remus?” The patroller repeats, his voice skipping a little with a nervous chuckle, “let’s get tidied up?”

His pulse singing with hysterical mortification, Sirius groans a little and wishes the fall had maybe knocked him out cold as well. “Sure, Remus,” he grits out as he staggers onto the stretcher, paying very close attention to the warmth radiating from that red patroller parka and the very-close-to-his-face plumes of breath whuffing out from Remus’ mouth, “let’s.”


	17. Tempest's Tea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Coming out to a parent  
> Canon-compliant, First War era
> 
> nervous!Remus, lovely!Hope  
> POV - Remus
> 
> Tea at mother's, an admission, the vague press of immediacy.

There's a lot to be worried about these days. New flat, new Order roles, new  _ life _ rolling in for some of them—especially with Lily just beginning to show the pregnancy she isn't talking about, James throwing himself headlong into missions, Pete just falling right off the face of the earth, etcetera et-fucking-cetera. 

But Remus, ever the contrarian, is combating all of it with a quiet visit to his mother's. 

"It's still four sugars and no milk, isn't it?" Hope's voice is raised prettily from the kitchen, everything about her still beautiful in that quiet sort of way of hers even as her hair has faded to a steady grey and her smile lines have carved themselves in around her mouth a little more deeply. Remus shifts in his father's old armchair and feels perhaps a bit of Lyall's ghost whispering around his own edges with his armor of a bulky jumper wrapped around his shoulders and a pair of brogues he's re-soled twice on his feet. 

Remus' own voice cracks just a bit in his throat; "No, ah, two sugars, please. And yes, no milk."

_ It’s just tea, _ Sirius had coached him from the Floo. His nose had been cold and his breath limned with the remnants of his afternoon cigarette, jacket still on and boots fastened in evidence of heading out once Remus leaves to do God knows whatever it is Sirius gets up to when Remus can’t bring himself to ask. He knows it isn’t sordid, nothing so base as slinking off for anyone who isn’t Remus, but it’s still shadowy and spiny and smacks of subterfuge.  _ You’re just having tea with your mum and it will be fine. _

_ It will be fine, _ Remus’ echo like a glass censer as his heels crunched faintly on the soot beneath them and he flexed a fist around the powder in his hands. It’s Remus’ idea to tell Hope about their Flatmates-More-Than-Flatmates mess, this headlong spiral in which they’ve found themselves now, in case all the disaster billowing up from the pit of serpents at their collective feet ever saw fit to crash in through the doorway and smite them standing before Remus could get the chance to tell someone the bloody  _ truth _ for once.

_ It will be fine, _ he reminds himself now as Hope comes back into the sitting room and sets Remus’ tea down across from him with the remnants of the second sugar cube dissolving in it, a lone ice floe in the middle of a searing sienna sea.  _ It will be fine. _

“I’ve...news,” he says into that teacup, avoiding Hope’s gaze with a glancing slice. Hope makes a calm sound, mothering sound, around the lip of a shallow sip on her own pour of one-sugar-half-milk.

“What sort? Good?”

Hope looks at Remus with open adoration, the sort of look that only comes from twenty years of love weathered by catastrophe and bliss alike. It grips Remus fast around his heart and clenches hard, such that he takes an extra couple breaths past a pale little smile. “Yeah, I—yes, I think so.”

“Is it the Potters? Did that nice Longbottom girl finally get married, what was her name, Alice? How about Peter, have you heard from him lately?”

This is what Hope has always done best, filling the silence with warm things. It was a blessing when Remus was learning how to read, or trying to ignore the spangling burn in his bones with each moon— _ They walked around a rock, _ Hope would murmur on the third go-through of Remus’ favorite Mr. Benn story,  _ and met a man dressed in rags, sitting on a large lump of gold _ —but now it makes him terribly nervous. Remus runs the tip of his tongue over the shallow chip in one of his left premolars, a gift from last month’s harvest moon, and gives a thin little smile as he shakes his head. “No, mum, it’s—it’s about me.”

“You!” Hope sends him a bright smile, small smile, her frost-green eyes crimping pleasantly at their corners over the rim of her teacup. “Well, I should think ‘I-Think-So’ good news in your opinion is ‘Quite-Momentous’ good news in mine.”

Chewing on his lip, watching the last granule of his sugarcube  _ plip _ away into the murk of his Darjeeling, Remus supposed he’s never really done himself the favor of letting his own milestones be as large as they ought to. He shrugs and crosses his feet at his ankles. He feels very safe here, in the house that smells of all the best pieces of his childhood across from the woman who has always managed to remind him there are lovely things extant amid all the chaos, so he nods. “I think you’re right. It—well, it’s about Sirius, too.”

“Are you look to get another flat, then? Or perhaps a house? You  _ did _ say it was good news, so I would hope that—”

Oh, he loves to hear his mother carry on about inanities with that middle-high voice of hers that was never really any good at lullabies, but Remus finds that if he doesn’t blurt it out now he’ll never get the chance to say it again; “We’re together.”

Hope stops, her eyebrows raised slightly, the very portrait of surprised grace. “Oh,” she breathes. Remus’ own breath is held in his lungs, staring sharply at her as though the moment itself will dash away without eye contact. “By which you mean…?”

“In love,” Remus croaks, helpless to stop the truth. “Have been, for quite some time. I always meant to say something, at—at Christmas, or any time I visited, but it never—I never thought…” he makes a strangled sound and gestures vaguely with the hand not gripping his tea saucer in a vise. “It always felt out-of-place to say something. But I figure things are getting quite hectic nowadays, and—and I wanted to tell you, straight and proper. I—well, I love him, mother. And he loves me. He takes terribly good care of me, he always has.”

There’s a shimmer built up along the bottom edge of Hope’s lashes, and Remus feels bare panic for a brief flash through his veins before a wobbly sort of relief replaces when she smiles alongside it. “You haven’t called me ‘mother’ in years, do you know that?”

Remus clears his throat, his thumb gone white in his grip on the saucer. “I love him, mum,” his hoarse correction drawing out a little jag of laughter from Hope.

“I think you have,” she says gently, reaching across the coffee table to lay a tender touch on Remus’ knee, “for quite a long time.”

His heart does a shallow flip behind his ribs as Remus feels a surprised and sideways half-smile take up residence on his face. “Yeah?”

“I’ve always told you, Remus, you deserve good things.” Hope takes another sip from her tea which makes Remus remember his own. He tucks into a hasty drink, not quite scalding his tongue but surprising his palette with its warmth, as Hope settles back into her chair and looks at Remus with, of all things Remus had dreaded or expected to rise up within her upon spilling the secret that had plagued him for almost four years running now, pride suffusing her at every angle. “And you’re very good at listening to reason.”

“How’s that?” The eternal ten-year-old that lives in Remus’ spirit ripples with fulfillment as he sinks now into the comfort of repartee, ready to relax into the trade of Hope’s own wit against the bulk of it he’s inherited from her.

Hope grins at him, youth spilling over her edges as she dabs casually at the corners of her eyes to clear away the happy tears sprung up there just moments ago. “Sirius Black is  _ very _ good things, darling.”


	18. Forbidden Fruit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: **T**  
>  Meet-unconventional  
> Modern non-Magical AU
> 
> Barista!Sirius, sex shop employee!Remus  
> POV - Sirius
> 
> Creative use of a Santa hat, Christmastime in Texas, the sudden urge to Need To Know.
> 
> _Written for girlwithacrown's[2019 Wolfstar Advent Calendar collection](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/wolfstars_advent)_

_ Santa Claus is coming, alright,  _ Sirius thinks to himself with a quiet snort. He hefts his bag up a little higher on his shoulder as he looks with mild awe at the very purposefully-placed Santa hat on the mannequin in the window. It is not, as one might expect, on his head.

“Merry Christmas! Anything catch your eye?”

With a start, Sirius blinks at the translucent wash of his reflection in the shop window lit with soft blue from above.  _ Forbidden Fruit, _ the neon sign shouts softly into the dusk as it always does on Sirius’ daily walking commute to and from the coffee shop,  _ Keeping Austin Kinky Since 1981! _

The man’s voice is muted from behind the wide pane of glass, his presence all but hidden by the ridiculousness of the mannequin he’s just posed, but it doesn’t mute the lean cut of his figure or the way his small smile dimples one of his cheeks. “Gorgeous,” Sirius means to think, but of course he says it and of course the man redressing the rest of the window flushes a very faint shade of pink. Sirius wishes intently to swallow his tongue while he stares, the vague outline of his body in the glass meshing almost too perfectly with the man standing before and just a few inches above him there within the shop.

“Me, or Mr. December here?” The man gestures at the mannequin with one eyebrow raised, his hands to his hips as though thoroughly weighing the pros and cons of a faceless pink plastic partner. Sirius can’t help but sniff another wry little laugh, returning to himself with a quiet internal scramble.

“I think I prefer my men with articulated limbs.” He raises his voice a little to break through the roundabout path the sound of it has to take through the seams of the glass and the open shop door, and Sirius watches a woman walking her dog passing behind him pull a confused, frowning face in the reverse of the window reflection. He would be embarrassed if not for the bright, crystalline laugh it begs from the man in the window—the gorgeous one, the one with elbows and knees, the one just barely biting his lip now as he looks out at the street, out at Sirius with something like intrigue in those pretty brown eyes of his.

“I’m Remus,” he says clearly. It looks as though he’s refraining from pressing a palm to the glass in some ridiculous show of dramatics, so Sirius holds himself back from doing the same and making an idiot of himself—or, accidentally causing more work for someone to scrub off his fingerprints later. He settles for shaking his fingers back in a comb through the length of his hair.

“I’m Sirius.” With a nod back over to the mannequin, Sirius puts his own hands on his hips as his shoes scuff against the dry asphalt beneath his feet. “Creative choice of underwear there for Mr. December, I’m impressed.”

The man dressing the window, Remus, jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Oh, we’ve got  _ way _ more creative pieces inside. Christmas discount to boot, care to look?”

He can’t help it; Sirius lets his gaze slide over and rake steadily up and down Remus in a slow sweep. He grins his favorite  _ Well Hello There _ grin and shrugs. “I’m always up for a glance.”

Remus bites his lips together as though holding in a glass vase of a secret, a smile playing at the corners of that pretty mouth. He lopes down off the risen platform of the window display with a particular spring in his step that telegraphs to Sirius the bid to follow him further into the store, and Sirius gives himself one hell of a gift just a couple days before Christmas by stepping into the shop with potential humming in his chest like a damn good song.


End file.
